Victoria Station Victoria Street, London Middlesex England

Victoria station,also known as London Victoria,is a major central railway terminus, underground railway interchange station and coach station in the City of Westminster in London. It is the second busiest railway terminus in London (and the UK) after Waterloo. It is in Travelcard Zone 1. It is named after the British monarch Queen Victoria.

There are effectively four railway stations: two of them serve main lines routes, one underground station, constructed by the cut and cover method serving the District and Circle Lines, and one deep-level tube line

Operationally, there are effectively two separate main line termini:

• The eastern (Chatham) side, comprising platforms 1–8, is the terminus for services to Kent on the Chatham Main Line and its branches. This also serves as the London terminus for the Venice Simplon Orient Express, from Platform 2, the longest platform.
• The western (Brighton) side, comprising platforms 9–19, is the terminus for services to Surrey and Sussex, including Gatwick Airport and Brighton on the Brighton Main Line and also the East Grinstead Branch on the Oxted Line.

This split is generally held to, as the track layout does not allow much swapping, with only a small number of connecting flyovers between the main lines in the Battersea area, plus a single track connection immediately outside the station. As the Brighton side is the busier of the two, disruption on that line sometimes results in some of its suburban services using the eastern side. This is particularly true of the Gatwick Express, which travels along the Brighton Main Line, as it will often divert over Chatham side tracks during engineering works in order to maintain service levels.

There are Ticket barriers to platforms 1-12 and 15-19. Platforms 13 and 14, where the Gatwick Express service departs, are without ticket barriers.

The railways of Southern England were at a disadvantage with respect to the London metropolis during the nineteenth century, in so far as their lines were south of the river Thames, whereas the main centres of population, business and government were on the north side in the City of London, the West End and Westminster. Victoria Station came about in a rather piecemeal fashion to help address this problem for the London Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) and the London Chatham and Dover Railway (LC&DR). It originally consisted of two contiguous mainline railway stations, which from the viewpoint of passengers, were unconnected.

The London and Brighton Railway terminus at London Bridge provided reasonable access to the City of London but was most inconvenient for travellers to and from Westminster. As early as 1842 John Urpeth Rastrick had proposed that the railway should therefore build a branch to serve the West End, but his proposal came to nothing. However. the transfer of the The Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Penge between 1851 and 1854 created a major tourist attraction in the rural area south of London. The West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway was incorporated on 4 August 1853 to serve the new site, and constructed a line from the Brighton main line at Sydenham past the site, to a new station at Battersea Wharf, at the southern end of the new Chelsea Bridge. (Despite its location, the new station was called Pimlico; it opened on 27 March 1858.) Shortly afterwards the LB&SCR leased most of the lines of the new railway, thereby providing itself with a route into west London, although, it was soon recognised that a terminus would be needed on the north side of the River Thames.

Three other railway companies were then seeking suitable locations for a terminus in Westminster: the Great Western (GWR) and the London & North Western (LNWR), and the East Kent Railway EKR. The first two of these companies already had rail access to Battersea through their joint ownership of the West London Line with the LB&SCR. In 1858, the EKR, leased the remaining lines of the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway from Shortlands railway station, and negotiated temporary running powers over the lines recently acquired by the LB&SCR, pending the construction of their own line into west London. On 23 July 1859 these four companies together formed the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway (VS&PR) company, with the object of extending the existing railway from Battersea across the river to a more convenient location nearer the West End,and the following month the EKR changed its name to the London Chatham and Dover Railway. The new line required the construction of a new bridge over the Thames, originally known as Victoria Bridge and later as Grosvenor Bridge. It was of mixed gauge to cater for GWR locomotives.

The LB&SCR had hoped to amalgamate with the VS&PR and introduced a Parliamentary Bill to allow them to do so in 1860. This was opposed by the GWR and LC&DR and rejected. By way of compromise the LB&SCR was permitted to lease the new station from the VS&PR, but agreed to accommodate the other railways until such time as a second terminus could be built for them on an adjoining site.