Ockley railway station

Ockley railway station serves the villages of Ockley and Capel in Surrey, England and is situated 1.4 miles from Ockley village and only half a mile west of the village of Capel. The station is 29 railway miles (47 km) south of London Victoria station. Ockley is managed by Southern which also provides all the services.

It opened as Ockley & Capel on 1 May 1867 as part of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway extension to Horsham. Its situation next to Le Steeres of Jayes Park brickworks (closed c 1914) and nearby Phorpres Works (now Clockhouse Works) allowed for substantial brickwork traffic for many years. Milk traffic was also important until the early 1930s when this trade was lost to road transport.

Goods traffic declined slowly over the next thirty years ceasing finally in June 1962.

The station could very easily have suffered a similar fate (with the potential loss of many of its most important historic features - especially the wooden station canopy) as Warnham station level crossing and signal box, but in recent years Ockley Station has been protected from such an outcome by the efforts of one of the property owners living in the Station Approach who a number of years ago successfully applied to English Heritage to have the station Grade II listed. This means Network Rail must maintain it in its present form.

A great deal of further detail on the history of this station and the entire section of line between Dorking and Horsham can be found in John Harrod's Up The Dorking

Services
For most of the day there is only one train per hour southbound to Horsham via Warnham and there is also only one train per hour northbound towards Victoria via Holmwood, Dorking and then onwards via Sutton and Clapham Junction. However in the Monday to Friday morning peak northbound and the evening peak southbound there are some additional services on an approximately half hourly basis.

There is only a limited mid and late evening service Southbound from Monday to Friday as there are no trains from London Victoria between the 1920 service and the 2326 service; no evening service on a Saturday and no service at all on a Sunday.

Facilities
The station is completely unmanned. During the winter 2011/12 season the latest type of computerised touch sensitive screen based ticket machine was installed taking both credit and debit cards and cash that sells through tickets and season tickets to anywhere on the UK railway network in place of the previous Permit To Travel only ticket machine. Tickets can also be purchased in advance of travel from Southern's website at http://www.southernrailway.com, and then collected from the ticket machine at Ockley station before boarding a train using the credit or debit card with which they were purchased.

The station has free parking for around 17 cars (15 normal spaces and two disabled) in the Station Approach, but these spaces are often full by 7.30am on weekdays. When the station car park is full there is no other safe parking location at the station as the winding unlit Coles Lane from which the Station Approach is accessed is neither safe or suitable for parking and the nearest safe parking locations on public roads in Capel village are at least half a mile away. There is no taxi rank, so a taxi would have to be summoned by telephone from Dorking or Horsham rendering it largely uneconomic to do so. There is a BT Payphone in front of the station building which only takes credit or debit cards. There are no buses that serve the station itself.

Fares
For tickets travelling to London Victoria only from Ockley (but not to other London railway termini) there is a discount on the normal Southern off peak return walk up ticket price of around 15% available for approximately 30 weeks of the year (current fares regulations prevent Southern from offering a permanent discount on advance online purchase of discount tickets for travel on their own network on a year round basis) if tickets are bought in advance at www.southernrailway.com and then collected from the ticket machine at Ockley station using the credit or debit card with which the online booking was paid for. When available these discount advance purchase off peak day return tickets can be bought online as little as two hours before the departure time of the service on which a passenger intends to travel.

Journey times
Journey times now vary between 63 and 76 minutes to London Victoria compared to times of between only 51 and 60 minutes as recently as 1992.