Oxford's former station at Rewley Road was built using the same techniques, writes CHRIS KOENIG

A prime difference between the Crystal Palace, originally constructed for the Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park, and its offspring, the former Rewley Road Station in Oxford, was that one lasted just six months on its original site, and the other lasted 147 years.

Both experienced a reincarnation - the former at the Sydenham site to which it had been banished at the end of the 1851 Great Exhibition (now the property of former Oxford United owner Firoz Kassam), the latter at the Quainton Railway Society's Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, near Aylesbury, where it flourishes to this day as a visitor attraction for train buffs.

Many will remember the station. As little as ten years ago it stood on ground now occupied by the Said Business School. By then the Grade-II listed building was in an advanced state of Romantic decay, having done time since 1951, when it closed to railway passengers, fulfilling such unromantic roles as a tyre depot and car hire garage.

It had opened 100 years before that, in 1851, the same year as the Great Exhibition. The engineers who built it, Charles Fox and John Henderson, of Stafford, were the same men who had also developed Joseph Paxton's designs for the Crystal Palace which, sadly, burned to the ground, on its Sydenham site, in 1936.

Paxton, a pioneer in the use of glass and iron in construction, started his career as head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth.

Later he became an investor in Britain's burgeoning railway network, often working closely with railway tycoon Thomas Brassey of Heythrop Park, now also owned by Kassam, who constructed the Oxford-Bletchley line for the Buckinghamshire Railway, which line the Rewley Road station served.

The station engineers, obviously not unaware that the exhibition would attract a lot of day trippers from Oxford, borrowed so many of the construction techniques used in the palace that the magazine, The Structural Engineer, commented in 1975: "Until recently it had been thought that no trace of the Crystal Palace structure remained. Strictly speaking, none does, but something very similar has survived." It then went on to describe the Paxton-like work at Rewley Road.

The construction included ironwork such as decorative columns that doubled up as drainpipes, as well as a mass of decorative motifs.

The magazine continued. "Almost more telling as a comparison than the structural components are the remains of the decorative iron cladding at Oxford which were clearly made from the same castings as in the Exhibition Building."

The Rewley Road station was constructed at a cost of under £7,000, a price which included not only the station itself but also a large timber yard, - demolished in 1966 - a 312ft train shed, water tower, and a coal yard which remained in use until the mid-1990s. The ticket office was believed to have been brought from the Great Exhibition after closure.

The station was built next door to the Great Western Station, which stood on the site of the present station, and had opened a few years previously. During the Great Exhibition the two companies competed wildly with each other for passengers.

The Buckinghamshire Railway charged 3s 6d (17 new pence) for an excursion to London on the first one shilling (5p) admittance day, stating that the journey from Rewley Road to Euston would take just one and three-quarter hours. In the event the journey took two-and-a-half hours. Little change there then.