Sutton railway station is in the London Borough of Sutton in south London. It is the main station for Sutton town. It is served by First Capital Connect and Southern trains. It is in Travelcard Zone 5.
The four platforms at Sutton station are numbered 1 to 4 from north to south. Platforms 1 and 2 are on the lines to Wimbledon, Epsom, Leatherhead, Dorking, and Horsham. Platforms 3 and 4 are on the Epsom Downs Line, which becomes single track about half a mile south of the station. Platforms 1 and 3 are used by services from outer termini to Central London. Trains from Central London use platforms 2 and 4. Terminating trains which return to central London generally use platform 4.
Platforms 1 and 2 can accommodate 12-coach trains and were used by the express services to Bognor and Portsmouth until they were diverted in the early 1980s to serve Gatwick Airport. Nowadays all trains calling at Sutton are formed of ten coaches or fewer. At the London end of platform 1 there are the remains of a fifth platform which was a bay for local services via Mitcham Junction.
Two waiting rooms serve the station: one has its own cafe; the other has a Starbucks kiosk adjacent.
Three lifts serve all platforms - one each for platforms one, two/three and four.
Sutton station was opened by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) on 10 May 1847 when the railway opened its line from West Croydon to Epsom. A branch to Epsom Downs was opened on 22 May 1865 followed by a line to Mitcham Junction on 1 October 1868. The final change to the station came when the branch to Wimbledon opened on 5 January 1930. Until the early 1980s, it was possible to catch a direct express train to the coast from here to Bognor Regis, Chichester and Portsmouth. This service, until its withdrawal, also gave Sutton the fastest ever journey time of 17 minutes to London Victoria. Since the 1980s, these express services are routed via East Croydon to serve Gatwick Airport and passengers from Sutton for the south coast now have to change at Horsham or travel to West Croydon and walk, take the bus or use Croydon's Tramlink service to get to East Croydon.
Today, the service to London Victoria now takes over 25 minutes on the direct route via Hackbridge.
Parliamentary approval for a line from Wimbledon to Sutton had been obtained by the Wimbledon and Sutton Railway (W&SR) in 1910 but work had been delayed by World War I. From the W&SR's inception, the MDR was a shareholder of the company and had rights to run trains over the line when built. In the 1920s, the London Electric Railway (LER, precursor of London Underground) planned, through its ownership of the MDR, to use part of the route for an extension of the City and South London Railway (C&SLR, now the Northern line) to Sutton. The SR objected and an agreement was reached that enabled the C&SLR to extend as far as Morden in exchange for the LER giving up its rights over the W&SR route. The SR subsequently built the line, one of the last to be built in the London area. The line opened on 5 January 1930 when full services on the line were extended from South Merton.