Effingham Junction railway station

Effingham Junction railway station is just north of the far northern border of the village of Effingham, closer to the centre of East Horsley, homes of which it borders, in Surrey, England. Although the station takes its name from the former town, and the immediate vicinity has itself become known as Effingham Junction, it is actually in the latter. Effingham Junction is at the junction of the New Guildford Line, from London Waterloo to Guildford, and the line from Leatherhead, which carries trains from London Waterloo via Epsom.

The London and South Western Railway opened the station on 2 July 1888, three years after completing the two routes that serve it. Both routes were subsequently electrified by the Southern Railway in 1925 and for many years it served as the terminus for trains from the Epsom direction, with a seven-road carriage shed south of the station provided by the SR to allow empty EMU sets to be reversed and stabled clear of the main running lines. This still stands, though it ceased to be used for carriage storage in 1993 – it is now used by Colas Rail as a maintenance base for Network Rail MPVs and track machines.

The station is managed and primarily serviced by South West Trains, though Southern also provides some peak period services. The latter are a holdover from the British Rail-era timetables of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Epsom line had regular services to London Victoria as well as to Waterloo. It was also served in the late 1980s/early 1990s by Thameslink services between Luton and Guildford via Herne Hill and West Croydon, but these ended in 1994 shortly before the privatisation of the UK railway network.