The Great Central Main Line (GCML), also known as the London Extension of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway opened in 1899 linking Sheffield with Marylebone Station in London via Nottingham and Leicester. Following a disagreement with Metropolitan Railway (MetR) over use of their tracks for part of the route the company build the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway joint line by-passing the greater part of the MetR's tracks. It was the last main line railway built in Britain during the victorian period and it was initially a financial disaster, only recovering under the inspired leadership of Sam Fay.
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Route
The line was very much a strategic one in its concept. It was not 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 (147 km) 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 and 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.
Remaining infrastructure
Passenger services still operate over the joint line between London Marylebone and Aylesbury Vale Parkway 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.
A short extension of passenger services to a new Aylesbury Vale Parkway railway station on the Aylesbury-Bicester main road opened on 14 December 2008.[1]
There are proposals to open the section from Aylesbury Parkway to Claydon Junction as part of the East West Rail Link[2] which is currently used only for freight consisting of binliner (containerised domestic waste) and spoil trains going to the Calvert Waste Facility (landfill) site at Calvert just south of Calvert station. Five container trains each day use the site: four from Brentford (known as the "Calvert Binliner", and one from Bath and Bristol (known as the "Avon Binliner"). The containers, each of which contains 14 tons of waste, are unloaded at the transfer station onto lorries awaiting alongside which then transport the waste to the landfill site.[3] The site, dating from 1977 and now one of the largest in the country, stretches to 106 hectares and partly reuses the clay pits dug out by Calvert Brickworks which closed in 1991.[4]
In 1969, a group of enthusiasts volunteered to help preserve part of the railway. The group took over a stretch of the main line between Loughborough and the northern outskirts of Leicester, and in 1976 started operating as a heritage railway line known as the Great Central Steam Railway. The heritage group remains 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 run by the Great Central Railway (Nottingham). There are plans to relink this section to the adjacent mainline section.[citation needed]
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.
History
In 1864 Sir Edward Watkin took over directorship of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. 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.
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 (147 km) 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 other railway lines in Britain, the line was built to an expanded continental loading gauge which meant it could accommodate larger sized continental trains, in anticipation of traffic to a future Channel Tunnel. There is, however, a popular myth that the GCR was built to the standard continental Berne loading gauge - impossible, since the Berne gauge convention was not held until 1912.
- The line was engineered to very high standards: a ruling gradient of 1 in 176 (exceeded in only a few locations on the London extension) was employed; curves of a minimum radius of 1 mile (except in city areas) were used; and there was only one level crossing between Sheffield Victoria and London Marylebone (at Beighton, still in use).
- 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. It would also aid any future plans to add extra tracks (as was done in several locations).
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 semi-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 by Denis Anthony Brian Butler, 9th Earl of Lanesborough, a peer and railway supporter:
[Among] 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 [...].[5]
Recent history
Central Railway proposed to re-open the GCR largely as a freight link after completion of the Channel Tunnel rail link. These proposals financial, environmental and social difficulties and were rejected by Parliament twice[1].
Future plans
East West Rail Link
There are plans to re-open the section of track from Aylesbury Parkway to the old Varsity Line which is currently only used for freight traffic to passenger traffic as part of the proposed East West Rail Link.
Aylesbury to Rugby
Chiltern Railways wishes to reopen the Great Central Main Line north of Aylesbury to Rugby [6] and late to Leicester.
References
- ^ "Aylesbury Vale Parkway fully open in June". The Bucks Herald. 14 April 2009. http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/Aylesbury-Vale-Parkway-fully-open.5168325.jp. Retrieved 12 May 2009.
- ^ "East West Rail - Western Section". East West Rail Consortium. http://eastwestrail.org/reports/documents/GRIPStage2A4Flyer.pdf. Retrieved 12 May 2009.
- ^ Calvert waste transfer station
- ^ Calvert Landfill Site
- ^ The Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1965; Quoted in: Buckman, J., "The Steyning Line and its closure", S.B. Publications, 2002, p. 7.
- ^ "Chiltern Train Route". April 2009. http://www.cwn.org.uk/business/a-z/c/chiltern-railways/images/train-route.gif.
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 0-86288-076-9
External links
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