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Places to stay in Verney Junction
Verney Junction is a hamlet in the parish of Middle Claydon in north Buckinghamshire, England. It is on a disused railway line near Claydon House. The stone cottages that make up the hamlet were largely constructed to provide houses for workers on the railway in the early Victorian era. The hamlet is named after the Verney family of Claydon House. The new village included a cricket ground for the railway workers. Until 1936 Verney Junction railway station was the northern outpost of the Metropolitan Railway from Baker Street. It was the junction of that line with the Buckinghamshire Railway between Bletchley and Banbury (opened 1850) with a later line added from Verney Junction to Oxford (opened 1851). It was this later route that formed part of the "Varsity Line" from Oxford to Cambridge, and legend has it that the station was so called because the then isolation of the area meant that the only obvious name was that of the local landowner. Verney Junction was a melancholy location. Once a thriving, bustling station serving not only the branch that I followed that terminated there but also served the mainline LNWR track and also another branch to the north. This was originally also part of the Buckingham & Aylesbury Railway but was taken over in latter years by the LNWR as a route to Banbury. Today however is a completely different story. Although I believe it's technically still classed as an operational line, it's obvious that no locomotive has passed through this station for years. Bushes and trees have long replaced passengers on the platforms. Worse - trees are starting to take root on the tracks themselves. The location once had several sidings but today had a single, decaying line running through the main platform. The branch from here to Quainton Road would have run in parallel with the original twin track and would have had a platform of its own. This was entirely overgrown and unless I'd done some research before my visit, completely undetectable.
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