their sides and the parapet wall, and about clearance in the centre. There was no room for buildings of any description anywhere on the line. The company came under pressure to reopen Spa Road station, as competition from the railway had caused the demise of a horse-drawn coach service from Bermondsey to Deptford. It agreed to construct an improved station when the line was widened. This involved moving the access staircase to the north side of the viaduct, building a waiting and booking office room in the arches and constructing a shed over the line. A local contractor, Thomas Jackson, began work on the new station in June 1842 and it opened in September, with the work costing £450 (£33,000 at 2010 prices). The following February another life was lost at Spa Road when a man named Birmingham suffered a fatal injury in the station. The station was upgraded in August 1843 when signals were erected there, and in May 1844 the platforms were extended. The South Eastern Railway took over the L&GR the following year and rebuilt the whole station again. The reconstruction work, which took place in March 1845, saw the demolition of the stairway and the building of a new internal stair approach from an arch in West Street (now Marine Street) next to the arch occupied by the booking office. The tracks were relaid to make them diverge slightly, providing room for an island platform about wide. A small shelter was constructed there with a roof above track level and projecting about outwards, level with the sides of the carriages. A third-class passenger was killed on 1 April 1850 when he climbed part-way out of his open carriage and hit his head on the shelter's projecting roof as his Greenwich-bound train passed through the station. A subsequent Board of Trade enquiry recommended that steps should be taken to ensure that the "unruly class of passengers" found in third class should not have the "power to injure themselves" in future. In the same year, a small shelter for ticket collectors was erected on the Spa Road platform and trains to London Bridge were stopped there to carry out ticket collections before arriving at their destination. This arrangement continued until Charing Cross railway station was opened in 1864. For some years local children exploited the ticket stops at Spa Road. The ticket collections meant that up trains had