Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
House dates from 1847, and was designed by Stephenson in association with Dockray and
Normanville. Its distinctive feature is the vast conical roof of slate supported on twenty-
four cast-iron columns. The building was originally a turntable house for locomotives in
the days when expresses prepared for the journey north above the slope running down to
Euston. The turntable has gone, but a short section of line is still to be seen. The interior is
galleried and that part of the conical roof between the pillars and the walls is supported on
huge wooden uprights with tie-beams above. This turntable house is also tunnelled below.
A passage led to an inspection pit in the centre of the turntable. The early, almost lyrical,
railway age seems very close here; one can easily people the place with side-whiskered
men in corduroy and engine-drivers in stove-pipe hats.
The Round House, Chalk Farm
I have already said that the disappearance of Euston is a symbol of the end of the great
railway age, but there are one or two places still left in London where the period can be
felt, and I digress a moment to mention them here. There is, for instance, Old Broad Street
Station. Only the Victorians could have built that exterior staircase with stepped ranges of
Lombardic arches. The station has a strong nineteenth-century atmosphere, assisted by a
model of an old North London Railway locomotive on a delightfully period stand. From
Broad Street ran the Richmond branch of the L.N.W.R., electrified before the Great War
- that strange railway journey which finds its way by Camden and Hampstead Heath Sta-
tions to Surrey, the L.N.W.R. (as it was) running on to L.S.W.R. metals at Gunnersbury
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