on the northern branch of the Berks and Hants Railway, from to . This immediately halted the coach traffic and the turnpike road company's income, and crippled the canal company which had to slash rates and be henceforth content with limited local traffic. The canal sold out to the railway in 1852, which maintained it in operation until 1951. Then, a collapsed aqueduct closed it as a through route, although it was never formally abandoned. The railway line was extended to in 1864, and became part of a new direct GWR main line to Devon and Cornwall in 1906. Theale would have been one of the towns and villages dependent on the coaching trade, for which the arrival of a railway was a disaster. This is shown by successive editions of the Ordnance Survey, which show that the village entered stasis and did not grow until the 20th century. From 1847 to the early years of the 20th century, the village had to make do economically with local farming, a brewery and gravel extraction. The last named was, however, greatly facilitated by the railway and a large pit near the village, Theale Old Gravel Pit, opened in 1887 with its own railway siding. The 1898 Ordnance Survey map also shows a small gasworks next to the station, and a ropewalk off Station Road near its junction with the High Street. There is evidence that local farmers were growing hemp to make into rope. The railway to Devizes was closed in 1963, and Theale lost its local service to that town. Airfield RAF Theale is a former Second World War RAF training facility located on Sheffield Farm, just east of the canal swing bridge, and actually in Burghfield parish. It was opened in 1944, with two grass runways, and used for training by No. 26 Elementary Flying Training School, and, later in the same year, by No. 128 Gliding School. The training school used twenty-four de Havilland Tiger Moths. The canal by the airfield was fortified with pillboxes, one of which is a listed building. Motorway After the opening of the railway, the next major change for the village was the opening of the M4 motorway on 22 December 1971. The High Street went from having an enormous amount of traffic passing through, to none. Junction 12 on the motorway was built just east of the village. The old road was