Background
By the late 1850s the boom in railway construction was well and truly over. If your town or rural community had been bypassed, or had otherwise missed out on the railway, you were doomed to struggle along with poor communications, isolated from profitable market places and losing out to those fortunate enough to have rail connections. A typical scenario in the second half of the nineteenth century saw the promotion of branch lines to serve towns that had missed out and their (usually) rural hinterlands. This was the case in Suffolk where branch lines were built to serve the towns of Eye, Hadleigh, Framlingham and Leiston. Most new branch lines terminated in the sponsoring town. However, a few, such as the Eastern Union & Hadleigh Junction Railway (EU&HJR) which had pretensions to extend its line to Lavenham, and the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway which intended to make three connections with the Great Eastern Railway at Haughley Junction on the Ipswich to Norwich line and at Westerfield and Halesworth on the East Suffolk line, had unfulfilled ambitions to provide cross-country through links between lines of the major network.
Two towns that succeeded in positioning themselves on a secondary line which connected two main routes were Harleston, Norfolk, and Bungay, Suffolk.
The scheme
The valley of the River Waveney, stretching inland for over 30 miles, was one of the routes considered for a main line linking Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth with London. It would need no major bridges, tunnels or earthworks. However, objections by landowners led to the main line idea being thrown out and other lines were completed instead. This left the communities of the Waveney Valley cut off from the railway network.
The response to this situation was the promotion of the Waveney Valley Railway Act, which received Parliamentary approval on 3rd July 1851. The Act authorised the construction of a branch line from the Eastern Union Railway’s Ipswich to Norwich line at Tivetshall running generally east through Harleston and terminating at Bungay. Bungay was only six miles west of Beccles - a town in the process of being connected to the railway network via the Halesworth, Beccles & Haddiscoe Railway (HB&HR) which was to join the Lowestoft Railway at Haddiscoe giving a through route to Norwich. Proposals were soon forthcoming to link Halesworth with Woodbridge — there to connect with the Eastern Union Railway line being built from Ipswich. In 1856 Beccles would also be connected with Lowestoft via the Lowestoft & Beccles Railway (L&BR) and in 1859 the East Suffolk Railway would open throughout from Westerfield Junction, just north of Ipswich, via Beccles to Great Yarmouth South Town. Not surprisingly the Waveney Valley Railway obtained a supplementary Act, passed in August 1853, sanctioning the extension of its line eastwards from Bungay to Beccles.
Building/opening
The line was built in stages, the first being from Tivetshall to Harleston opened on 1st December 1855. It was initially worked by the Eastern Counties Railway (ECR), by that time well onbut relationships soured. The Waveney Valley line was extended to Bungay in November 1860, three months after the company had severed links with the ECR and commenced independent operation. This situation remained until the ECR became a constituent of the Great Eastern Railway (GER) from August 1862, by which time the branch was being extended to Beccles; This final section opened in March 1863, on the day that the Waveney Valley Railway was absorbed into the GER. The railway was twenty miles long and, as opened, had fourteen stations (including Tivetshall and Beccles).
