Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway

The Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway (B&CDR) was a railway company through the Cotswolds in England that built a line between points near Banbury and Cheltenham. Its principal objective, as well as a general rural rail service, was the conveyance of iron ore from the East Midlands to South Wales.

It extended two pre-existing branches, the Chipping Norton branch of the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway (OW&WR, opened in 1855) and the Bourton-on-the-Water Railway (opened in 1862). Both branches had their main line junction at Chipping Norton Junction, later renamed Kingham, on the OW&WR main line.

The B&CDR opened its western section, from Bourton-on-the-Water to a junction near Cheltenham, in 1881, and its eastern section, from Chipping Norton to a junction at Kings Sutton, near Banbury, in 1887. The company was always short of money, and the timescale of construction was correspondingly lengthy. When the extensions opened, the Great Western Railway worked the B&CDR line and the two earlier branches as a single railway throughout. Reversal of through trains was necessary at Chipping Norton Junction until a flyover line was opened, in 1906, and from that year a through express train from Barry to Newcastle Central ran over the route, using the flyover.

The company sold its undertaking to the GWR in 1896, receiving about a quarter of the capital it had expended on the construction. The line had difficult gradients and curvature, and much of the route was single track. Between 1951 and 1962 the passenger service was withdrawn in stages, and all of the line except a short stub at Kings Sutton was closed on 1964, followed by complete closure in 1969.