On 09/05/2011 12:42, Martin L wrote:
To a certain extent, I think that the usual convention may have been
that it depended on whether the station was actually named after a
place (for example, there are actually areas shown on the Ordnance
Survey map, not just stations, called North Acton, South Acton, East
Acton and West Acton), or whether the 'north' or 'central' or whatever
was simply added by the railway company to distinguish it from other
stations. Hence Finchley Central, because there isn't such a place as
Central Finchley, it's just the central station for Finchley; as
opposed to East Finchley, which is called that because there is
actually a place called East Finchley.

That makes a lot of sense... one wouldn't expect stations called Ham
East and Ham West, for instance!

...but it was usually down to the original railway company to do the
naming, hence the variations.

I'm sure there's at least an element of that.

On the other hand, stations have had their names changed over the years
(e.g. as a result of the grouping or nationalisation). So for instance,
in 1950 Lincoln [GN] became Lincoln Central and Lincoln [Midland] became
Lincoln St Marks. And some stations have changed their names completely
(e.g. in Birmingham, Vauxhall to Duddeston, and in the East Midlands,
Sawley Junction to Long Eaton). There are lots of other examples from
all over the UK rail network.

And if you look at Colonel Cobb's railway atlas of the UK, some places
had two stations not distinguished by different names, but after
nationalisation had suffixes attached (e.g. Ingrow East and Ingrow West
in West Yorkshire).
--
Jeremy Double {real address, include nospam}
Rail and transport photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmdoubl...7603834894248/