Great Central Railway

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This is about the historic company; see also about the present day preserved Great Central Railway (preserved).

The Great Central Railway (GCR) was the latter day name of a railway company of the United Kingdom which existed between 1847 and 1922 when it was grouped into the London and North Eastern Railway.

The Company originally opened as the Sheffield, Ashton-Under-Lyne and Manchester Railway. After it acquired other lines extending to Grimsby, it merged them together as the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway. In 1897 it extended to Marylebone in London when it adopted the 'Great Central Railway' name.

The Great Central Railway was most famous for the former main line from London to Sheffield via the East Midlands often known as the London Extension which was closed down as part of the Beeching Axe in the 1960s (see below).

Contents

1 History

1.1 The London extension
1.2 Traffic on the London extension
1.3 Rundown and closure

2 What still remains
3 Geography
4 See also
5 Further reading
6 External links

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 [link] 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.

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 mainline railway line to be built in Britain until section one of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link opened in 2003. It was also the shortest lived intercity railway line.

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 overran 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.

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.

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 1960 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.

The remains of Rugby Central Station

The stretches of the line between Rugby and Aylesbury, and Nottingham and Sheffield were closed in 1966, leaving only an unconnected stub between Rugby and Nottingham on which a skeleton passenger service operated. This last strech of the line was closed in 1969. The closure of the GCR was the largest single closure of the Beeching era, and one of the most controversial.

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.

What still remains

Aside from the preserved double-track Great Central Railway and the preserved single-track Great Central Railway (North), passenger services still operate over the joint line between London Marylebone and Aylesbury and also between Marylebone and High Wycombe (continuing northwards to Princes Risborough, Bicester North, Banbury and Birmingham Snow Hill). Strictly speaking, neither of these routes are specifically of GCR heritage, although the line between Neasden South Junction and Northolt Junction was built by the GCR and is still in use today for all Chiltern services. The line north of Aylesbury still exists as far as Claydon L&NE Junction (the point at which the GCR passes the former Oxford - Cambridge line, but has a freight-only service, which consists of binliner and spoil trains going to the landfill site at Calvert.

Sections around Rotherham are open for Passenger and Freight traffic, indeed a new station was built there in the 1980s using the Great Central lines which were closer to the town centre than the former Midland Railway station.

Commuter EMU trains run from Hadfield to Manchester via Glossop. These are modern trains using 25 kV overhead wires that were installed to replace the 1500 V system.

Train entering the remains of Deepcar Station

Daily steel trains run from Sheffield to Deepcar where they feed the nearby Stocksbridge Steelworks owned by Corus Group.

Geography

The London Extension

When it was operating, the London Extension began at Marylebone station in London, ran through northwest London including Wembley, and then diverged into a direct route towards Aylesbury and a new, less direct though less congested route via High Wycombe, joining the line from Marlow. The part of the line from London to Aylesbury/High Wycombe was never closed and is still in use today, with passenger services operated by Chiltern Railways. (For more on what remains, see above).

North of Aylesbury the line ran through sparsely populated countryside for about thirty miles until it reached the small town of Brackley in Northamptonshire. The line then ran through more sparsely populated countryside for another 15 miles (25 km) or so until it reached a village called Woodford Halse also in Northamptonshire, where it formed a junction with several other railway lines, including a spur to the town of Banbury and the Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway.

It ran north for another twenty miles or so until it reached the town of Rugby (at Rugby Central Station}. This was the first major population centre the line served after Aylesbury. The line crossed over the West Coast Main Line on a viaduct at Rugby, and ran north serving the small Leicestershire town of Lutterworth, and then another twenty miles north until it reached the city of Leicester (Leicester Central). It then ran to Nottingham (Nottingham Victoria), serving the town of Loughborough on the way, where it crossed the Midland Main Line. This part of the line is now run as a heritage railway.

It ran north for another fifty miles or so until it reached the city of Sheffield, serving the town of Chesterfield on the way. A number of smaller communities were also served by the line, which have not been mentioned here.

Other GCR lines

From Sheffield connecting GCR lines ran onwards to Rotherham and Barnsley and via joint lines and running powers on to Wakefield and Leeds. GCR also had joint ownership of the Macclesfield, Bollington and Marple Railway that from Macclesfield to Marple via Bollington for the GCR to have an alternative route into Manchester, the line was another victim of the Beeching axe and now exists as a Public Footpath. Also, a further line ran from Sheffield to Penistone and over the Pennines to Manchester via the famous Woodhead Tunnels. This section became the first fully electrified British main line in the early 1950s (using the soon to be non-standard 1500 volt DC system) but was closed in the early 1980s. Much of the trackbed through Longdendale can be walked, and there is talk of rebuilding the line (2003).

External links

Major constituent railway companies of the London and North Eastern Railway:

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