Reading Southern railway station was opened as the western terminus of the South Eastern Railway's route from , a junction station at the time of opening known as Reigate Junction in south-east Surrey, having direct links thence to Dover port, Brighton (a resort and fellow industrious town) and London Bridge. The station was referred to for exactly one century by an identical name to its neighbour, 'Reading', until 1949. Seven years after its opening the station expanded its uses by becoming the terminus of a new company's Waterloo to Reading line from London Waterloo station. This mid-length line added to the town's connections with more intermediate stops, beyond nearby Wokingham and mid-south parts of Surrey which had been directly served by the station and added a competing service, approximately one third longer in distance to a London terminus than the adjacent Great Western Railway.
The station closed for all purposes in 1970 when its demolition began. It was adjacent to, and to the south-east of, the Great Western Railway's Reading General station known since the other station's closure as Reading railway station. Part of the latter's 1989-built concourse is on the site of the west end frontage of the demolished Southern station.
History
Construction and early years
The original route of the South Eastern Railway (SER) was from London Bridge station to Dover, which took a route through so that several compass point sector-based companies could share the same lines and engineering (including a substantial tunnel) through the North Downs. The line from Reading to Redhill was built by the Reading, Guildford and Reigate Railway (RG&RR), and was opened in 1849: the section from Reading to Farnborough was opened on 4 July 1849, with the last section being opened on 15 October. From the start, the RG&RR was worked by the SER, which leased it from 16 July 1846, and absorbed it in 1852. When the first section of line opened, the SER trains served a temporary station north of Reading's Forbury Road before moving into a permanent terminal, about west, on 30 August 1855.
Reading had been served by the Great Western Railway (GWR) since 1840. The competing 1855 SER station was west of Vastern Road, on the corner of Blagrave Street and Station Road, adjacent to but south-east of the GWR station, and at a lower level.
The Staines, Wokingham & Woking Junction Railway (SW&WJR) opened a line between the existing London to Windsor line station of in Middlesex (today in northern Surrey) and in Berkshire on 9 July 1856; the SW&WJR was worked by the London and South Western Railway (LSWR), and they were authorised to run over the SER into Reading. In this way Reading gained a service into London Waterloo station. The SW&WJR was absorbed by the LSWR in 1878.
The original station did not last long, since it was destroyed by fire in 1859 after being struck by lightning. A replacement was built, which had two platform faces; it was enlarged in 1896 by the provision of two more faces following the resiting of the locomotive shed.
At the opening, there were four trains a day to (then known as Reigate Junction), two of which continued to ; a through service to London Bridge began in 1852, and in 1853, two more were added.
The middle period
In 1899 the South Eastern Railway handed over its operations to a new organisation co-owned with the London, Chatham and Dover Railway (LCDR), which traded as the South Eastern and Chatham Railway (SE&CR); the line and station continued to be owned and maintained by the SER. In 1923, the LSWR and SER amalgamated, together with other railways including the LCDR (and thus the SE&CR), to form the Southern Railway (SR), which assumed complete control of Reading station and its approaches.
In 1900, there were ten trains each weekday from Waterloo to Reading; by 1914 there were 14, and in 1922, 18. The services tended to be irregular, until the electrification of the inner suburban lines from Waterloo during 1915–16 brought a clock-face pattern to those services, in order to make it easy for people who did not understand timetables; the steam-hauled services, such as those to Reading, had to fit in (there were eight electric trains per hour on the Reading line as far as ) and so became more regular.
During the Dunkirk evacuation (27 May-4 June 1940), 293 special trains arrived at Reading from the Channel ports, most of which were handed over to the GWR.