Great Central Railway

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

The Great Central Railway (GCR) was the latter day name of a railway company of the United Kingdom which earlier was known as the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR). The company existed between 1847 and 1922 when it was grouped into the London and North Eastern Railway.

The company was known as the 'Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway' until 1897 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).

[edit] History

The MS&LR company was formed in 1847 by a merger of the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway (SA&MR) with several smaller railways including the Grimsby Docks Company, giving it access to Lincolnshire and the North Sea. Its initial route ran from Manchester London Road station, across the Pennines via the Woodhead Pass to Sheffield, and onwards to Lincoln, Grimsby and (by ferry) Hull. The company expanded further in 1863 when it absorbed the South Yorkshire Railway giving it access to the south Yorkshire coalfields. The MS&LR also had running powers 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.

[edit] The London extension

In 1864 Sir Edward Watkin took over directorship of the MS&LR. He had grand ambitions for the company. Watkin had plans to transform his company 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 believed that the MS&LR needed its own route to the capital. After several failed attempts to co-build a line to London with other companies. In the 1890s the MS&LR set about building its own line known as the London extension

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

Parliament gave consent to the new line in 1892, and building work started in 1895. At the time many people questioned the wisdom of building the line, as all the significant population centres which the line passed through were already served by other railway lines.

In 1897 in order to reflect the company's new found ambitions, the Manchester,Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway was re-named as the grander sounding 'Great Central Railway'.

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

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 also engineered to very high standards with minimal gradients and curves.

Another feature of the line was 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 overun its original budget of £3.5 million by a factor of three. In order to get permission to build the line they 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. The line was opened in 1899. The section of the line south of Aylesbury was built jointly by the GCR and the Metropolitan Railway

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 lines 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 Company was merged into the London and North Eastern Railway, which in 1948 was nationalised along with the rest of Britain's railway network.

[edit] Rundown and closure

From the late 1950s onwards the freight traffic (mostly coal and limestone) upon which the line relied upon started to decline, and the GCR 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.

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, seem as 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 and have yet to be approved.

[edit] Geography

The London extension

When it was operating, the London extension began at Marylebone in London, ran through northwest London including Wembley, and then diverged into a direct route towards Aylesbury and less direct route through High Wycombe. The part of the line between London and Aylesbury and High Wycombe was never closed and still operates today.

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 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. 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. It then ran to Nottingham, 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 on the way serving the town of Chesterfield. 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. Also, a further line ran from Sheffield to Penistone and over 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)

[edit] Component Companies

The following companies formed the inital Manchester, Sheffield And Lincolnshire Railway :

During its existence as the MS&LR the company absorbed these smaller ones :

It also absorbed some other on a joint basis :

Macclesfield, Bollington and Marple Railway - Joint with NSR
Manchester and Stockport Railway - Joint with MR
Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Railway - Joint with MR
Marple, New Mills and Hayfield Railway - Joint with MR
Oldham, Ashton-under-Lyne and Guide Bridge Railway - Joint with LNWR
Widnes Railway - Joint with MR

More such transactions followed once the company became the Great Central :

The Grimsby District Light Railway was a separate legal entity, but was projected by, and always wholly owned by the GCR.

[edit] External links

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

This article is based on a similar article at Wikipedia and as available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), as are all other articles at the UK Railways Wiki