A halt on the climb to Bincombe
Upwey Wishing Well Halt was a railway station at Bincombe, in the county of Dorset in England. It served the northern part of the village of Upwey, now a suburb of Weymouth, on what is now known as the Heart of Wessex Line and the South West Main Line. As its name records, the halt took its identity from the nearby Upwey wishing well — a borrowed name rather than a building of its own, the station standing apart from the spot that lent it the title.
A modest structure, plainly built. The Great Western Railway opened the halt in 1905 as part of a scheme to counter road competition, particularly from Weymouth’s buses. This was architecture at its most economical: GWR pagoda shelters set on wooden platforms, served by local Weymouth-to-Dorchester rail motor trains. The pagoda — that small, pitched-roof corrugated shelter the GWR deployed across its lesser stations — was the entire architectural gesture. The wooden platforms were later replaced with brick-built structures, but the pagodas remained until road competition forced the halt’s closure in 1957.
Setting and topography
What gave the site its character was the land it sat upon. The halt occupied a stretch where the line climbs hard from Weymouth up to Bincombe Tunnel, and the place remained popular with railway photographers, who found good pictures of steam locomotives labouring on the gradient from the former access paths and the A354 overbridge.
An unusual piece of engineering geography. Before the construction of the Weymouth relief road, the underbridge to the south of the platforms carried the same road as the overbridge to the north: the A354 negotiated a hairpin bend to the east of the line on its climb over Ridgeway Hill. The railway threaded a knotted landscape of road and ridge.
The well, and what remains
The wishing well that gave the halt its name lay nearby, the local feature the GWR chose to advertise in the station’s title. The source records the connection only by that name; the well itself is described no further here.
Nothing remains of the platforms, which were removed during works for the 1988 electrification. Trains still pass on the Heart of Wessex Line and the South West Main Line, running over a site now stripped of the small shelters that once marked it.
Bincombe, United Kingdom