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To begin with the service
consisted of five passenger services daily and two Sundays, but the Sunday service proved to be less popular and in May 1863 the service was cut to one a day and later in the year discontinued
completely. Problems started to occur at Bishopstoke (nowadays Eastleigh) with the passengers for the pier complaining that they were being left waiting an exceptionally long time by the London and South
Western Railway Company, who clearly favoured the Portsmouth route and consequently held the Stokes Bay customers back.The Railway and Pier company complained to the Directors of the South Western but
received little encouragement as regards an improvement to the service. The eventual establishment of the Lees Lane/Stokes Bay link went some way to all alleviating the problem, but it is not until July
1863 that we first read of the fares charged on the Stokes Bay line :-
Express fares Ordinary fares
Single Return Single Return
1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 3rd 1st 2nd
18/- 12/4 30/- 21/8 16/- 10/10 6/4 29/- 20/8
However by 1866 the steam
boat 'Her Majesty' was usually to be found working on the Stokes Bay run. One assumes that the reign of the 'Prince of Wales' on this route was a short lived one.' Her Majesty' was a 75 ton iron paddle
steamer which was built in 1850. It had had a varied career and in 1863 had sunk off the coast at St Helens on the Isle of Wight was subsequently raised refurbished, repaired and reboilered and returned
back into revenue earning service.
However after even more
problems by march 11th 1865 a petition for winding up the Isle of Wight Ferry Company was applied for. At this point the company had accumulated debts of well over £15.000 and on 13th May all the assets
of the Company were sold to the Ryde Pier Company.
To a degree the failure of
the Isle of Wight Ferry Company was not entirely its own fault. At that time the trains to Stokes Bay Pier were still having to reverse at Gosport station,which added at least another 15 minutes onto the
journey time ( the western arm of the triangle had yet to be constructed), and the ferry accommodation on the pier during heavy weather was far from adequate. In fact it was virtually impossible to tie
up a craft if a strong southwesterly wind was blowing. As the southwesterly was the predominant wind at the bay this was a great disadvantage. All this plus the unreliability of the South Western
Railway to forward passengers as fast as possible from Bishopstoke made for bad passenger relations.
As already
stated originally all the Stokes Bay traffic had to reverse at Gosport station but in 1864 the South Western Railway traffic committee recommended that a spur be constructed to connect the Stokes Bay
line directly with the Fareham line at a junction in Forton and to be called Lees Lane Junction. It was also recommended that a small passenger station be built on the Stokes Bay line just beyond the
junction with the Gosport spur of the newly opened triangle. The work was put in hand and the opening of the spur came into effect from 1st June 1865, just after the sale of the Isle of Wight company.
The coaches were now split from the west of England trains at Bishopstoke where passengers from other services, could join and the train could be worked from Fareham right out onto Stokes Bay Pier
without having to call at Gosport first. Initially, however, only two trains a day used this avoiding line.
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