Great Central Railway: Encyclopedia II - Great Central Railway - History

Great Central Railway - History

The MS&LR company was formed in 1847 by a merger of the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway; the Sheffield & Lincolnshire Junction Railway: the Great Grimsby & Sheffield Junction Railway: and the Grimsby Docks Company. This grouping gave the Railway an East-West main line linking Manchester and giving it access to Lincolnshire and the North Sea. Its initial route ran from Manchester London Road, across the Pennines via the Woodhead Pass to Sheffield Victoria station, Doncaster and onwards to Lincoln, Grimsby and (by ferry) Hull. The company expanded further on August 1, 1864 when it absorbed the South Yorkshire Railway [1] giving it access to the south Yorkshire coalfields. The MS&LR, in view of its part ownership of the Cheshire Lines Committee, had direct access to Liverpool, Chester and Warrington.

The MS&LR was, for much of its existence, engaged in fierce competition with other stronger railway companies including the London and North Western Railway the Great Northern Railway and the Midland Railway. For this reason the company never flourished.

In 1864 Sir Edward Watkin took over directorship of the MS&LR. He had grand ambitions for the company: he had plans to transform it from a provincial middle-of-the-road railway company into a major national player. Watkin was a visionary who wanted to build a new railway line that would not only link his network to London, but which one day would be expanded and link to a future Channel Tunnel. This ambition was never fulfilled. He grew tired of handing over potentially lucrative London-bound traffic over to rivals, and, after several attempts to co-build a line to London with other companies, believed that the MS&LR needed its own route to the capital. At the time many people questioned the wisdom of building the line, as all the significant population centres which the line traversed were already served by other railway companies' lines.

Great Central Railway - The London extension

In the 1890s the MS&LR set about building its own line, having received Parliamentary approval in 1893, for the London Extension. Building work started in 1895: the line opened for passenger traffic on 15 March 1899, and for goods traffic on 11 April 1899.

The London extension was the last intercity railway line to be built in Britain, and also the shortest lived.

The new line, 92 miles (147km) in length, was built from Annesley in Nottinghamshire to join the existing Metropolitan Railway (MetR) Extension at Quainton Road where the line became joint MetR/GCR owned and returned to GCR metals at Harrow for the final section to Marylebone.

Features of the line were:

• Unlike any other railway line in Britain the line was built to the continental Berne Gauge which meant it could accommodate larger sized continental trains, in anticipation of traffic to a future Channel Tunnel.
• The line was engineered to very high standards with minimal gradients and curves.
• The standardised design of stations, which were all built to an "island platform" design with one platform between the two tracks instead of two at each side.

The cost of building the line was huge and overan its original budget of £3.5 million by a factor of three. In order to get permission to build the line the Company had to agree to put parts of the line through tunnels to avoid upsetting the local land owners. It was so expensive that the original plans for their London terminus at Marylebone had to be scaled back drastically.

Great Central Railway - Traffic on the London extension

The London Extension's main competitor was the Midland Railway which had served the route between London the East Midlands and Sheffield since the 1860s on a different route.

Traffic was slow to establish itself on the new line, passenger traffic especially so. Poaching customers away from the established lines into London was more difficult than the GCR's builders had hoped. Passenger traffic was never heavy throughout the line's existence, but freight traffic grew healthily and became the lifeblood of the line.

The First World War and the hostile European political climate which followed, ended any possibility of a Channel Tunnel being constructed within the GCR's lifetime.

In the 1923 Grouping the Great Central Railway was merged into the London and North Eastern Railway, which in 1948 was nationalised along with the rest of Britain's railway network.

Great Central Railway - Rundown and closure

From the late 1950s onwards the freight traffic (mostly coal and limestone) upon which the line relied started to decline, and the GCR route was largely neglected as other railway lines were thought to be more important. In 1958 the express passenger services were discontinued, leaving only a slow service to London.

In the 1960s Beeching era, Dr Beeching decided that the London to northern England route was already well served by other railway lines, and that most of the traffic on the GCR could be diverted to other lines. Closure became inevitable.

Many people have argued that the closure of the line was short-sighted, since the Channel Tunnel opened just 25 years after the line closed.

A group of enthusiasts and volunteers took over a stretch of the line between Loughborough and the northern outskirts of Leicester and started operating it as a heritage railway line for tourists known as the Great Central Steam Railway, which still operates to this day.

Since construction started on the Channel Tunnel in the 1980s, a private company called Central Railway has put forward proposals to re-open the GCR largely as a freight link. These proposals face many difficulties, financial, environmental and social, and have twice been rejected by Parliament.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki