Looking at a map of Norfolk’s railways from a century ago is testament to how much has been lost, with a great swathe of territory between the King’s Lynn line (west), the Thetford line (south) and the Cromer line (east) being devoid of railway today.
Today’s national network consists of those three lines, plus the main line from Liverpool Street, heading into Norwich, via Diss, and a clutch of lines east of Norwich (the two lines to Yarmouth, one of which continues to Lowestoft). Up on the north coast there’s also the line between Cromer and Sheringham, a fragment of a line that once looped all the way around to Norwich City.
Norfolk, of course, is a flat, agrarian county, so the industrial lines that predominated in other parts of the country, were scarcer here. That is not to say that they didn’t exist (the Wissington Light Railway being an example). There’s also sand still extracted at Middleton Towers, on the old King’s Lynn-Swaffham line. The lack of heavy industry did mean, however, that railways arrived relatively late (from the early-1840s), with a lack of large settlements (excepting Norwich) also a factor. Once the railway companies came calling, however, that flat landscape encouraged them to penetrate Norfolk, such that almost every town and village was near to a station. Norfolk, with its coastline, benefited from holiday traffic (the likes of Hunstanton, Yarmouth and Cromer all grew substantially).
Two companies predominant
In Norfolk the railways were dominated by two companies, certainly from the end of the nineteenth century, these being the Great Eastern (GER), formed in 1862 from an amalgamation of five other companies, and the Midland & Great Northern Joint (M&GNJR), which had its headquarters and workshops in Melton Constable (on the Holt-Norwich City) line, where it crossed the M&GNJR’s Fakenham-North Walsham line). Crewe or Swindon it was not, but you can still glean today that this was an industrial centre, due to the terraced housing built by the railway company. The M&GNJR, which dated to 1893 and an amalgam of routes opened by several different companies (1864-83), would become one of the country’s most important joint railways, so its HQ benefited from a grand water tower (extant), three-road engine shed, coaling stage, paint and fitting shops.
Work began on the workshops in 1881, when it was still the Lynn & Fakenham Railway and the population of Melton Constable soared from a paltry 118 in that year to 1,157 just three decades later. When the M&GNJR was fully absorbed into the London & North Eastern Railway in 1936 the need for separate works at Melton ceased. Norwich City (1882), with its Italian-style brick frontage, was the M&GNJR terminus in Norwich which was badly mauled during the so-called ‘Baedeker Raids’ of World War II (named after the German-published travel guides, as they targeted English cities of cultural and historic importance). City station closed to passengers in 1959, as did the rest of those ex-M&GNJR lines, although some bits persisted for freight for a few years.
Come 1923 and the ‘Big Four’, Norfolk’s railways passed pretty much ‘lock, stock and barrel’ to the LNER, although the M&GNJR wouldn’t be fully absorbed until 1936. By then, road transport was already biting, which saw some early closures, including the seven-mile Downham and Stoke Ferry Railway, which closed to passengers in 1930.
There would be a resurgence
