I'm trying to find out more information about George White's 1882 proposal for a new railway to Bristol to compete with the Great Western. The complication is I'm doing so from the Southern Hemisphere.

I have only been able to find very generic information about the proposed route, that it would have run from the "centre" of Bristol through Radstock, Westbury and Shrewton to join the London and South Western Railway at Grately.

The Bill was debated in Parliament but the only route information in the speeches was that it would have gone literally right past Stonehenge and cut through the cursus, which is one of the reasons it was defeated.

I'm mainly interested in the location of the proposed Bristol terminus (which was supposedly to rival Temple Meads) and the route through the city. The National Archives has some plans but they mainly deal with the proximity to Stonehenge.

There is a plan of the proposed route through the city in the records of the Bristol Urban Sanitary Authority but the curators at the Bristol Record Office advised me it is too fragile to handle.

Anybody have any information or suggestions of where else to look?

Cheers
Dave

There is a small book in the central lending library (local studies) that shows the proposed route through Bristol, with a City Centre terminus.

I don't suppose you'd have bibliographic details? As noted in the first paragraph, I'm not in the same hemisphere as Bristol.

Cheers
Dave

This from 'The Annals of Bristol' by John Latimer, published in 1887.


“Much local interest was created in 1883 by the introduction into parliament of a bill for authorising the construction of a railway to connect the London and South Western line, near Andover, with the North Somerset line at Radstock, and thus to open out a new communication between Bristol and London. The capital of the proposed company was £1,866,000. The contemplated works in Bristol were of a gigantic character, the projected line being intended to run through a dense mass of property between St.Philip’s Marsh and the stone Bridge, while a site for the city terminus was to be obtained by covering over the float from the Stone Bridge to the Drawbridge. The scheme met an amount of approval rarely accorded to local plans of improvement, the provisional committee formed for promoting the bill comprising a majority of the council and of the leading mechantile firms, while the merchants' society made a liberal grant towards the expenses; the Chamber of Commerce forwarded petitions in favour of the scheme, and meetings in its support were held in every ward. In fact, as was observed at the time, Bristolians presented the rare spectacle of being unanimous. The Bristol satisfaction was visibly diminished by an announcement that the proposed station was to be indefinitely postponed. The junction with the North Somerset line was also abandonded through the opposition of the Midland company, and the promoters had to fall back upon a proposed railway to join the Midland system at Bath, thus diverting Bristol traffic by way of Mangotsfield. After a long struggle with the Great Western Company before a committee of the House of Commons, the bill was rejected. Shortly afterwards the Great Western and South Western boards entered into a compact, by which they mutually undertook to refrain for ten years from an aggressive policy towards each other. The agreement raised an insuperable bar against the revival of the above scheme.”

Kevin.