CURRENT expansion plans for Oxford railway station envisage extra platforms at the northern and southern ends, but this is a vision of what might have been, sent in by Frank Dumbleton, of Chilton.

The lithograph, dating from about 1846, shows the Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway’s proposed station to serve the city. The picture is displayed in the Great Western Trust’s Museum and Archive at Didcot Railway Centre.

It is a splendid structure and, if it had been built, would have provided a suitably grand arrival in a city that had to make do with a series of rather less imposing stations down the years.

Mr Dumbleton writes: “The architectural style is very similar to Stoke-on-Trent station, which was completed in 1848 and is described as a ‘robust Jacobean manor house’.

“The Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway (OWW) had a difficult history. It was incorporated in 1845 by Act of Parliament, but not completed until 1853. The route from Oxford to Worcester is today’s Cotswold Line.

“It was inextricably drawn into the gauge wars, with the Great Western Railway’s broad gauge branch from Didcot to Oxford at its southern end, and the standard gauge railways of the rest of the country at the Wolverhampton end.

“Not surprisingly, the gauge controversy cost much money, and the OWW had little left to build stations in the style it would have liked. In 1860, it became part of the West Midland Railway, which was absorbed into the Great Western Railway in 1863.

“The Oxford station lithograph used to hang at Paddington station in London, along with many other mementoes of the Isambard Kingdom Brunel era.

“When Stanley Raymond became the Western Region’s general manager in the early 1960s, he had a mission to banish the GWR traditions that still permeated the place, and he ordered that all the pictures be destroyed. Fortunately, railway enthusiasts rescued many of them.

“Stanley Raymond went on to become chairman of the British Railways Board until he was sacked by Transport Minister Barbara Castle in 1967 – a move that many railway enthusiasts applauded, even if the sacking was not connected with his destruction of GWR artefacts.”

The fine building the OWW proposed was a stark contrast with Oxford’s first station, built by the GWR in 1844 at Grandpont, seen in an image from The Illustrated Guide to the Great Western Railway, published in 1852.

The guide’s author and illustrator, George Measom, had nothing to say about the timber-built station, which would close that October with the opening of the line from Banbury to Birmingham and a new Oxford station on the current site, preferring instead to wax lyrical about the city, its university and its churches.

He was more impressed by the then Didcot station, which he said was “formed on a very large and liberal scale, with every provision for the traffic of an important cross-line, and is covered throughout from end to end”.

Didcot itself “requires but very little description; for, with the exception of a quaint old church, worth a glance –and that is all, – an ancient rood or churchyard cross, and a few gabled, pretty cottages, there is nothing worthy of notice”.