Varsity Line

The Varsity Line was the main railway line that linked the English university cities of Oxford and Cambridge, operated by the London and North Western Railway. In World War II, the line became a strategic route for freight avoiding London, and additional connections were made to nearby lines to improve it, but was not greatly used for its intended purpose. After the war, the line was again scheduled to be developed as a strategic route, but that scheme was never fully implemented either. Passenger services were withdrawn from most of the line on 1 January 1968, and only the Bletchley–Bedford section remained open for passenger traffic. In 1987, the section between Oxford and Bicester was reopened, followed in 2015 by a connection to the Chiltern Main Line at Bicester, enabling Chiltern Railways to operate an Oxford to London passenger service. There are funded plans for the entire line to be re-established by the mid 2020s, partly on a new route and under a new name - East West Rail. The Oxford to Cambridge line, when completed, ran broadly west to east. In the early days there were five intersecting trunk lines running south to north: The Great Western Railway at Oxford, with its northward allies; the London and Birmingham Railway, forming part of the later West Coast Main Line; the Midland Main Line, opened by the Midland Railway, crossing the route at Bedford; the East Coast Main Line, opened by the Great Northern Railway, forming a connection at Sandy; and the Eastern Counties Railway at Cambridge. Two other trunk routes, the Great Western Railway's Bicester cut-off and the Great Central Railway main line, were built later. Although a continuous line from Oxford to Cambridge was proposed from time to time, it was actually built by local schemes. From west to east, these were: the Buckinghamshire Railway, from Oxford to Bletchley; the Bedford Railway, from Bletchley to Bedford; the Bedford and Cambridge Railway, between those points, which adopted the alignment of an earlier private scheme, the Sandy and Potton Railway.

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Wolverhampton

Wolverhampton (ˌwʊlvərˈhæmptən) is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands, England. The population was 263,700 in 2021. People from the city are called "Wulfrunians". The city is located north-west of Birmingham. Historically in Staffordshire, the city grew as a market town specialising in the wool trade. In the Industrial Revolution, it became a major centre for coal mining, steel production, lock making, and the manufacture of cars and motorcycles.

Varsity Line

Bletchley railway station

Bletchley railway station serves the southern parts of Milton Keynes, England (especially Bletchley itself), and the north-eastern parts of Aylesbury Vale. It is northwest of , about east of and west of , and is one of the seven railway stations serving the Milton Keynes urban area. It includes junctions of the West Coast Main Line with the Bletchley-Bedford Marston Vale Line and the disused Bletchley-Oxford Varsity line. It is the nearest main line station for Bletchley Park (the World War II codebreaking centre and modern heritage attraction) and Stadium MK (the home of Milton Keynes Dons F.