Rugby Central Station

Image: © Derek McKay Taken: Unknown

Rugby Central was opened in 1899 and lasted just 70 years; it is seen here in its penultimate year by which time operations had been reduced to an infrequent service to Nottingham. There was no staff by this time, all tickets were sold on the train. The station was notoriously inconvenient for the town centre, a fact immortalised by Sir John Betjeman with his line: ‘And quite where Rugby Central is, does only Rugby know’. Inconvenience was a feature of the service; the line connected four towns (Rugby, Leicester, Loughborough and Nottingham) where it had its own separate station, drastically limiting the opportunities for connections (although at Nottingham Arkwright Street was only a short walk from the Midland station). Uniquely, in fact, from a passenger's point of view the line was not connected at all with the rest of the rail network. This view shows how things changed here over the following 40 years: Image

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