Hunstanton Railway Station - History

History

The building of the line to Hunstanton coincided with the rising popularity of North-West Norfolk as a destination for holidaymakers who were arriving in large numbers. Hunstanton itself had been promoted as a seaside resort by Henry Styleman Le Strange (1815-1862), lord of the manor and principal landowner, who gifted land and investment towards the construction of the line. The station was equipped with two long island platforms which could take excursion trains with up to a thousand people aboard, and its seafront location meant that passengers were discharged directly on to the promenade and pier. Long-stay holidaymakers came and left on Saturdays, whilst day-trippers generally came on Sundays in a constant stream of trains at ten-minute intervals. Many stayed at the towering Sandringham Hotel which was conveniently situated at the end of the platforms.

The single-track line into Hunstanton ran almost straight into the station, with beach huts and bungalows on the left and rolling hills to the right. Nearer the seafront the line crossed South Beach Road on the level, before entering the station whose twin island platforms diverged outwards in a roughly triangular arrangement, covered by Great Eastern flat-topped canopies. As well as its four main terminal roads, there were five goods sidings to the east of the platforms which also served as carriage sidings at the height of the Summer season; the sidings converged into a single headshunt which led southwards to Hunstanton Gas Works. In addition, a long siding on the eastern side of the station served cattle docks and an end-loading bay.

Having reached its peak in the mid-1950s, passenger numbers began to decline following the closure of railway lines such as the Midland & Great Northern which had the effect of destroying a whole range of connections to Hunstanton. In addition, through services from Liverpool Street station were withdrawn from 1959, leaving Hunstanton with a DMU service to and from King's Lynn. By 1966, services to London had been reduced to one working on weekdays, together with two up and one down on Summer Saturdays. Although the line did not figure in the Beeching Report, a survey carried out by British Rail in the mid-1960s revealed that 90% of traffic in the region was generated by only 100 stations. This led to the implementation of the "basic railway" concept whereby stations became unstaffed, signal boxes closed and the line was singled.

At Hunstanton, the removal of most of the sidings and stabling facilities meant that through-locomotive excursion trains could no longer be run. As fewer and fewer passengers were using the line, British Rail announced that the line was losing £40,000 per year and would close from Monday 5 May 1969. The last train ran at 9.05pm on Saturday 3 May from King's Lynn, and was packed with around 250 passengers, a similar number waiting at Hunstanton to mark the occasion.