Kendal and Windermere Railway

The Kendal and Windermere Railway is a railway in Cumbria in north-west England. It was built as a railway from the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway at Oxenholme via Kendal to near Windermere, opening fully in April 1847. The engineer was Joseph Locke and the partnership of contractors consisted of Thomas Brassey, William Mackenzie, Robert Stephenson and George Heald. It remains open, albeit in much simplified form, as the Windermere Branch Line.

The Kendal & Windermere was promoted because of concerns that the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway (which now forms part of the West Coast Main Line from London to Glasgow) was not planned to go via Kendal. Although a 3.5 km tunnel north of Kendal was proposed to allow the L&CR to be routed via Kendal, that was too expensive, and the line seen today was adopted, running 1.5 km east of Kendal and then turning north-east.

As a result, efforts were put towards a branch line from the L&CR at Oxenholme, to run through Kendal to Windermere. In this context, "Windermere" meant the lake, the Windermere station terminus being at the village of Birthwaite about one kilometre from the lake, the village only later becoming known as Windermere. Oxenholme's railway station is now known as 'Oxenholme Lake District' because of the branch line.

There was opposition to the proposals from those who were against what they saw as destruction of the Lake District landscape. Those opposing included the poet William Wordsworth. His letters to the editor of the Morning Post are reproduced in The Illustrated Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, P. Bicknell, Ed. (Congdon and Weed, New York, 1984), pp. 186–198. His reactions to the technological and "picturesque" incursions of man on his beloved, wild landscape most famously include the following sonnet:

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