The chosen route to Southampton was not direct as it adopted a compromise axis about one third of the way down for a westward Bristol line, never built. This axis terminates shortly after the conurbation on the line of Basingstoke, then an agrarian market town. The route therefore missed the towns of Guildford, Farnham and Alton which would have boosted early revenue. The railway was also forced narrowly to bypass the town of Kingston-upon-Thames due to the commercial justification that the railway would damage the town's importance for stagecoaches combined with the cost of furrowing a line through the town's easterly hill. The city of Winchester north of Southampton was included in the built and in the unbuilt proposal, seeing its station open in 1839.