Cranleigh line

The Cranleigh line was a railway line in England that connected Guildford in Surrey, with Horsham in West Sussex. Construction of the line was started by an independent company, the Horsham and Guildford Direct Railway, but management failures delayed construction, and the company was taken over by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSCR). The LBSCR completed the construction of the line and it was opened in 1865; it was nearly 16 miles in length.

At Guildford the trains relied on using the station and approach route of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR). There was competitive tension between the LSWR and the LBSCR, and at the time Guildford station was already congested, so that access negotiations were not easy. The hopes of the original promoters that the line would become a trunk route for traffic from the Midlands to the Sussex Coast were not fulfilled, and low usage due to the agricultural nature of the terrain the line served resulted in continuous financial losses.

When British Railways considered the future of loss-making services in the mid-1960s, the line came under scrutiny, and it was closed on 14 June 1965.