Everything about Great Central Main Line totally explained
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The
Great Central Main Line (GCML), also known as the
London Extension of the
Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway was a main railway line in England that linked
Sheffield with
Marylebone Station in
London via
Nottingham and
Leicester. Opened in
1899, it was the last main line railway built in Britain until
High Speed 1 opened in
2003.
The construction of the line was a financial disaster for the MS&LR, shortly renamed as
Great Central Railway which had previously been a moderately successful trans-pennine provincial railway. However the inspired leadership by the General Manager
Sam Fay (later knighted for his role in the
Railway Operating Division in
WW1) succeeded in turning this disaster around.
Originally, the southern part of the route into London was over existing tracks mainly built by the
Metropolitan Railway (MetR) and shared with that company. However, non-cooperation on the MetR's part caused the GCR to build the
Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway joint line, which by-passed the greater part of the MetR's tracks, except for a shorter section on the approach to Marylebone.
At the northern end, at Sheffield, it connected
Woodhead Route which linked
Manchester and other GCR lines in
Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire.
There is a petition on the website of the Prime Minister to reopen the line.
History
In 1864 Sir
Edward Watkin took over directorship of the
Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. He had grand ambitions for the company: he'd 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 wouldn't 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.
In the
1890s the MS&LR
set about building its own line, having received Parliamentary approval on
28 March 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
High Speed 1 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, and only one level crossing.
- The standardised design of stations, almost all of which were built to an "island platform" design with one platform between the two tracks instead of two at each side. This was so that the tracks only needed to be moved further away from the platform if continental trains were to traverse the line, rather than wholesale redesign of stations.
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. However, there was some success in appealing to higher class 'business' travellers in providing high speed luxurious trains. These were in a way the first long distance commuter trains. 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.
The various Channel Tunnel schemes, including one in 1883 which prompted Sir
Edward Watkin and the MS&LR to construct the London extension, but which foundered on the fear of
French invasion; and further work in the 1920s, but yet again vetoed for similar reasons, probably ended any possibility of any such construction being constructed within the GCR's lifetime. The extension thereby lost much of its
raison d'etre, and almost certainly led to its being a casualty of the
Beeching Axe in the
1960s.
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. It was designated a duplicate of the
Midland Main Line and transferred to the
London Midland Region, whose management still had loyalties to former companies (Midland/LMS) and against their rivals GCR/LNER. In
1960 the express passenger services were discontinued, leaving only a medium-fast 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 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 stretch 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. Indeed, in a contemporary letter published in the
Daily Telegraph of
28 September 1965,
Lord Lanesborough commented that "[a]mong the main lines in the process of closure, surely the prize for idiotic policy must go to the destruction of the until recently most profitable railway per ton of freight and per passenger carried in the whole British Railways system, as shown by their own operating statistics. These figures were presented to monthly management meetings until the 1950s, when they were suppressed as "unnecessary", but one suspects really "inconvenient" for those proposing Beeching type policies of unnecessarily severe contraction of services [...] This railway is of course the Great Central forming a direct Continental loading gauge route from Sheffield and the North to the Thames valley and London for Dover and France [...]".
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.
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
In 1969 a group of enthusiasts and volunteers was formed to preserve a substantial chunk of the double-track main line. In due course it took over a stretch of the line between Loughborough and the northern outskirts of Leicester and in 1976 started operating it as a heritage railway line for tourists known as the
Great Central Steam Railway. It remains very active to this day.
Additionally a preserved single-track section under the auspices of the Nottingham Transport Heritage Centre at Ruddington is operated with occasional services by the Great Central Railway (Nottingham). There are plans to relink this section to the adjacent double-track section described above.
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, maintained and run 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 (containerised domestic waste) and spoil trains going to the
landfill site at
Calvert. A short extension of passenger services to a new
Aylesbury Vale Parkway railway station on the Aylesbury-Bicester main road is due to open in 2009.
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.
Daily
steel trains run from
Sheffield to
Deepcar where they feed the nearby
Stocksbridge Steelworks owned by
Corus Group.
It is possible that sometime in the near future the whole line from Aylesbury north towards Brackley including the rebuilding of Brackley Viaduct will take place as the railway network is in need of expansion through increased passenger capacity.
Route
The line was very much a strategic one in its concept. It wasn't intended to mimic the Midland line, whereby it had to serve a great many centres of population: hence the fact that for much of the route it ran through sparsely populated countryside. Commencing at
Annesley in
Nottinghamshire, and running for 92 miles (147km) in a relatively direct southward route, it left the crowded corridor through
Nottingham (and
Nottingham Victoria railway station), which was also used by the Midland and the
London and North Western Railway (LNWR), it struck off to its new railway station at
Leicester Central, passing
Loughborough en route where it crossed the Midland main line. Four railway companies served Leicester: GCR, Midland, GNR, and LNWR. Avoiding
Wigston, the GCR served the town of
Lutterworth before reaching the town of
Rugby (at
Rugby Central Station). At
Woodford Halse there was a connection with the
East & West Junction Railway (later incorporated into the
Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway), and slightly further south the GCR branch to the
Great Western Railway station at Banbury. Apart from a small freight branch to
Gotham between Nottingham and Loughborough, these were the only branch lines from the London extension. Although the line crossed several other railways, there were few physical connections.
Sources
Dow, George (1965) Great Central, Vol II : Domination of Watkin, 1864-1899, London : Ian Allan, 437p
Healy, John M.C. Echoes of the Great Central, Greenwich Editions (1987) ISBN 0-86288-076-9Further Information
Get more info on 'Great Central Main Line'.
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