Chevening Halt is a now-closed intermediate railway station on the Westerham branch line in Kent

Kent

Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

.

The line was built as single track

Single track (rail)

A single track railway is where trains in both directions share the same track. Single track is normally used on lesser used rail lines, often branch lines, where the traffic density is not high enough to justify the cost of building double tracks....

 with provision for double track

Double track

A double track railway usually involves running one track in each direction, compared to a single track railway where trains in both directions share the same track.- Overview :...

. The station was built by South Eastern and Chatham Railway

South Eastern and Chatham Railway

The South Eastern and Chatham Railway Companies Joint Management Committee , known by its shorter name of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway was a working union of two neighbouring rival railways, the South Eastern Railway and London, Chatham and Dover Railway , that operated services between...

 (SECR) and opened on either 16 or 19 April 1906. Operations were taken over by the Southern Railway

Southern Railway (Great Britain)

The Southern Railway was a British railway company established in the 1923 Grouping. It linked London with the Channel ports, South West England, South coast resorts and Kent...

 with the 1923 railway grouping

Railways Act 1921

The Railways Act 1921, also known as the Grouping Act, was an enactment by the British government of David Lloyd George intended to stem the losses being made by many of the country's 120 railway companies, move the railways away from internal competition, and to retain some of the benefits which...

 and thereafter by the Southern Region

Southern Region of British Railways

The Southern Region was a region of British Railways from 1948. The region ceased to be an operating unit in its own right in the 1980s and was wound up at the end of 1992. The region covered south London, southern England and the south coast, including the busy commuter belt areas of Kent, Sussex...

 of British Rail

British Rail

British Railways , which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was the operator of most of the rail transport in Great Britain between 1948 and 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the "Big Four" British railway companies and lasted until the gradual privatisation of British Rail, in stages...

ways which closed the line on 30 October 1961 ostensibly due to low patronage. The line was the subject of a revival/preservation attempt which was scuppered by plans for the M25

M25 motorway

The M25 motorway, or London Orbital, is a orbital motorway that almost encircles Greater London, England, in the United Kingdom. The motorway was first mooted early in the 20th century. A few sections, based on the now abandoned London Ringways plan, were constructed in the early 1970s and it ...

 which called for the use of much of the route of the line.

The former station site is today a rough piece of overgrown scrubland bordering Junction 5 of the M25; this motorway is infamous as having been responsible for the dashing of any hopes of preserving the Westerham Branch. In 1964 the Kent County Council had demanded from the Westerham Valley Railway Association, an association seeking to retain the railway for heritage operations, the sum of £26,215 (approximately £337,000 today) for a bridge to carry the railway line over the M25; failure to pay this sum would lead to the immediate in-filling of the Chevening cutting (in which the Halt lay), which is exactly what happened when funds could not be raised. According to one account, the halt platform was buried and remains there to this day.

Other stations

• Westerham
  Westerham railway station
  Westerham railway station served the village of Westerham in Kent from 1881 until its closure in 1961.- History :No railway was ever constructed all the way between Sevenoaks and Redhill to parallel what is now the A25 road and the Pilgrims' Way...
  
  
• Brasted
  Brasted railway station
  Brasted is a disused intermediate railway station on the closed Westerham Valley Branch Line in Kent.The station was built by the Westerham Valley Railway Company and soon taken over by the South Eastern Railway which became the South Eastern and Chatham Railway in 1899...
  
  
• Dunton Green
  Dunton Green railway station
  Dunton Green railway station serves the village of Dunton Green, on the outskirts of Sevenoaks in Kent. Train services are provided by Southeastern.There is no ticket office or ticket machine. There is a Permit to Travel machine...