The London Underground was the world’s first underground urban railway, opened in 1863. For most people, the Underground conjures an image of a crowded Tube train in the heart of London, which slips from view into the inky darkness of a tunnel as soon as the doors slide shut. Yet the team-hauled Underground once reached the rural quietness of Buckinghamshire, 50 miles from London, and its electric trains still glide through sheep-filled fields and ancient woodlands beyond London’s M25 orbital motorway.

In this post, I’ll explore the London Underground’s lost lines in Buckinghamshire, while celebrating its remaining rural tentacles in the county.

Verney Junction: 50 miles by luxury train to the City via London Underground

You probably haven’t heard of Verney Junction, let alone been there. It’s a place created by the railway as the furthest outpost of the London Underground network. A century ago, you could step into a luxury Pullman carriage here, bound for the City of London. After a lengthy journey through the Vale of Aylesbury, Wendover, Amersham and Wembley, the view from your window would fade to black as your train threaded its way through the Metropolitan Railway’s congested tunnels beyond Baker Street reaching Liverpool Street two hours after departure. (These were amongst the only London Transport carriages with toilets.) The contrast with Verney Junction would have been striking.

Why did this pioneer of underground urban travel strike out into the deserted lands of rural Bucks? It was largely down to one man’s dream of a railway from the north of England to Paris via a channel tunnel. Sir Edward Watkin was chairman of three railways: the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, the Metropolitan and the South Eastern. He saw that the Met could provide an entrance to London for his new 90 mile Great Central main line from Annesley, north of Nottingham, to Quainton Road in Buckinghamshire. The South Eastern Railway would then link with his proposed tunnel, which reached a mile under the sea from the English and French coasts n the 1880s before being abandoned after the army spread fears that it could be used by an invading army. Not something that concerned Margaret Thatcher when she agreed to build a tunnel a century later.

Michael Williams gives a fine impression of this isolated spot in his poignant 2015 book, The Trains Now Departed:

‘Poor Verney Junction, stranded in the middle of nowhere and left to wither – not a town, nor a village, nor even a hamlet, but somewhere in the middle of a field. There was no local population to serve a station, no shop, church or chapel, and even the most ruthless of Metro-land estate agents never thought the hinterland promising enough to build any homes.’

Verney Junction was where Met travellers from London could change for the Varsity Line linking Oxford and Cambridge. The station boasted a cosy waiting room with a ‘bright fire’, which must have been a comfort for its handful of passengers during the brutal winter of 1962/63. Verney Junction struggled on until the axe fell on the Varsity line five years later. Almost sixty years on, passenger trains will once again pass through this one-time London Underground outpost as Oxford and Cambridge are again reunited by rail. But they won’t stop here: any passengers wishing to visit will have to alight at the new station at nearby Winslow.

Quainton Road: change for the 1935 train to Brill

I like the idea of London Transport serving a village with thatched cottages and a windmill. This is Quainton, less than a mile from Quainton Road station. A century ago, you could catch one of those Met Pullmans from here, or change for a tram to the village of Brill.

If Verney Junction seemed an unlikely outpost of the London Underground, the Brill Tramway was even more improbable. This six mile line between Quainton Road station and Brill was built by the third duke of Buckingham as a horse-drawn tramway to move goods between his estate at Wotton and the national rail network. Even when locomotives were introduced average speeds rarely exceeded 4mph, which ensured a good safety record if you ignore the fate of a few stray sheep, run over by the tram. It’s far from clear why the Metropolitan Railway took it over – this ramshackle line would play no part on Sir Edward Watkins’ dream of trains from Manchester to Paris, and a suggested extension to Oxford came to nothing, despite the Met paying for a survey of the route.

The end of the line for the country end of the Met line

In 1933, the Metropolitan Railway was merged with London’s tube lines, trams and buses to form the London Passenger Transport Board. The LPTB quickly developed London Transport as one of the world’s first great brands, with Harry Beck’s brilliant diagrammatic tube map making sense of the complex network, and chief executive Frank Pick changing the face of the network through architecture and design. The interwar years saw a huge expansion of London’s transport system, but it was clear very soon that the Met’s rural outposts had no place in this urban network.

The last train from Brill arrived at Quainton Road on Saturday 30 November 1935. After the end of London Transport services, the Metropolitan’s lease was voided and the tramway and stations were once again controlled by the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company. The O&ATC auctioned everything off, and the company passed into history on 11 November 1940. By then, Britain’s cities were being devastated in the Blitz, and no one cared about the fate of a tramway in Buckinghamshire.

London Transport ended Metropolitan line services north of Aylesbury in 1936, but the London & North Eastern Railway and later British Railways continued operating main line services along the former Great Central London extension until 1966.

Quainton Road today

The Metropolitan Railway’s station at Quainton Road in May 2026

Happily, you can still catch a train at Quainton Road today, although it may only take you a few hundred metres, possibly hauled by a steam locomotive masquerading as Thomas the Tank Engine. This is the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, which dates back to 1969. It has an excellent cafe and shop, which is open on weekdays even when the rest of the site is closed. You can find out more at the centre’s website.

For a small station, Quainton Road has a very grand main building. This is a 21st century addition to the original structure: a magnificent resurrection of Oxford’s ‘other’ station, Rewley Road. This was the terminus of the London & North Western Railway’s line from Bletchley, appropriately passing through Verney Junction. It closed in 1951 after services were transferred to the Great Western Railway’s better connected through station after nationalisation. The building survived as a tyre depot until being dismantled in 1998 when the site was acquired for Oxford University’s Said Business School.

The rural London Underground in 2026

London Transport may have axed its furthest rural outputs 90 years ago, but this photo shows that even today you can set off on a rural journey from Liverpool Street or Baker Street. You won’t travel in Pullman luxury but you will glimpse ancient woodlands, mellow hills and a chalk stream – one of just over 200 globally.

Chesham’s small station building reflects its history. The Metropolitan Railway wanted to extend this short branch to the West Coast Main Line at Tring, and the petite building was sited to leave room for this to happen. To this day, the end of the line seems to point onwards, to that abandoned aspiration.

The Metropolitan intended to build Chesham station about a mile short of the town centre on Chesham Moor, seen above. But the local people raised £2,000 to extend the line into the centre of town, and the station we see today opened in 1889. The planned station hotel was built next to the original station site, but after losing its purpose became the Unicorn pub, which closed in the 1990s.

Above: the Chesham shuttle service in August 1960. Photos: Colin Tait, London Transport Museum

Until the early 1960s, Met Line trains between Rickmansworth and Amersham, Chesham and Aylesbury were steam-hauled. The Chesham trains were hauled by former LNER and LMS steam locomotives, and passengers travelled in coaches dating from the last years of the 19th century. The last steam locomotive to work the line (other than steam specials) was a London Transport (ex GWR) pannier tank which removed the tracks lifted after the goods yard closed in 1966.

In the 1980s, there were fears that the Chesham line would close because the bridges that carried the line into the town needed replacing but Buckinghamshire County Council was unwilling to cover the cost. Happily, the doomed Greater London Council, about to be abolished by Margaret Thatcher in an act of spite, paid the £1.1m even though the branch line was outside Greater London.

The Chesham branch leaves the mainline at Chalfont & Latimer station, which opened as Chalfont Road in 1889. The distance between the junction and Chesham is the longest between any two stations on the Underground.

When the Met Line was electrified as far as Amersham and Chesham in 1960, London Underground handed the rest of the line to Aylesbury to British Railways. Today, Chiltern Railways operates the service between Amersham and Aylesbury Vale Parkway, but the discerning traveller will notice that the station buildings at Great Missenden, Wendover and Stoke Mandeville are the original Metropolitan Railway structures, reflecting the line’s pre-1960 owners.

Metroland

Britain’s railways played a defining role in the expansion of our major cities. The Metropolitan Railway didn’t just enable the growth of suburbia – it directed it. As long ago as the 1880s it saw new homes as a lucrative source of extra income. In 1915 – during the Great War – it coined the name Metro-land, and after the war ended its estates business built thousands of homes along the line at places like Pinner, Rickmansworth, Chorleywood and Amersham. Back in 1973 the then poet-laureate John Betjeman marked the railway’s legacy in Metro-land, a celebrated film for the BBC that you can find on YouTube.

PS: five of today’s London Underground stations are beyond the M25 London orbital motorway: Metropolitan Line: Chorleywood (Herts), Chalfont & Latimer, Amersham and Chesham (Bucks); Central Line: Epping (Essex).