Palace Gates Line

The Palace Gates Line was a short railway branch line in north London running from the main line at Seven Sisters station in Tottenham to Palace Gates (Wood Green) station in Wood Green.

Palace Gates Line
Hertford Loop Line
 Bowes Park
Alexandra
Palace
│
Palace
Gates
Noel Park and Wood Green
 West Green
Seven Sisters
Route of Palace Gates Line highlighted on a 1900 map

Opening

The line was constructed by the Great Eastern Railway (GER) and opened on 1 January 1878 with a temporary terminus at Noel Park and Wood Green station before being opened to Palace Gates (Wood Green) station on 7 October 1878. The line was opened in competition with the Great Northern Railway (GNR) line from King's Cross station to provide passenger services from the GER's London terminus at Liverpool Street station to the recently opened Alexandra Palace and the developing suburb of Wood Green.

Extension to Bowes Park

After the 1921 Railways Act amalgamated the GER, GNR and other railway companies into the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) in 1923, a connection to Bowes Park on the GNR Hertford Loop Line, which runs just north of the site of the terminus station, was made in 1929.

Decline

With the nearby GNR built stations at Alexandra Palace and Hornsey providing a more direct route to central London, the catchment areas for the line's stations were always fairly small and the opening in 1932 of the first section of the Piccadilly line extension to Cockfosters with stations at Wood Green and Turnpike Lane diminished them further, crucially eroding the line's passenger traffic.

In the early 1950s, the line was one of only two branches in the London area still worked by elderly F5, mainly, and F6 2-4-2Ts. The remaining examples of these were called into Stratford Works for withdrawal, in mid-1958. There then being no other suitable locomotives for the Palace Gates line, many of its trains were worked by J68 and J69 0-6-0Ts until sufficient N7 0-6-2Ts became available, following the electrification of suburban services from Liverpool Street station to Chingford and Hertford, in November, 1960. N7 and L1 steam locomotives continued to be used, until September, 1962.

Closure

The Palace Gates line was closed to passengers on 7 January 1963. Goods services continued to run until 5 October 1964.

The site today

Tracks were removed and the stations demolished and the route of the line has been almost entirely covered by new construction including The Mall Wood Green (Shopping City). The only part of the line that remains is a short section of track within Bounds Green Depot where the line formerly connected to the Hertford Loop Line. A small section of the route can be seen from Avenue Road.[1]

The latest (2015) proposed route for Crossrail 2, sees an option that would closely resemble the Palace Gates Line, running from Seven Sisters/South Tottenham railway station (double-ended station) through either Turnpike Lane and Alexandra Palace stations, or Wood Green Underground station, on its way to New Southgate railway station.[2]

gollark: *Do* you think I should actually store the compressed size? It would require either compressing to a temporary file and concatting it on later, or leaving some space in the pre-file-header bit to write it in after it's been compressed.
gollark: I "fixed" it, I just needed to enable single frame mode.
gollark: Arguably I should have some sort of "compressed size" field on it, but that would be work, so *instead* I'll just not do that and add on a length thing if it ever becomes necessary to not zstd-encode files.
gollark: And it was not in fact reading multiple files but I edited it in the wrong place.
gollark: It would be really stupid to read the entire file into memory.

References
  1. "Palace Gates Railway line to South Tottenham". www.geograph.org.uk. Retrieved 8 February 2013.
  2. "Citizen Space - Crossrail 2 - October 2015". Retrieved 22 November 2015.
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