Six decades ago saw the publication of British Railways chairman Dr R ichard Beeching’s infamous report, The Reshaping of British Railways. Appointed in a bid to reduce soaring losses, one major strand of Beeching’s rationa lisation of the network was to eliminate routes that ‘ doubled up’ and which dated from an era of competition f irstly between the pre-Grouping companies and then the Big Four.
The biggest of the Beeching closures was the Great Central Railway’s London Extension, the last trunk route built in the UK’s steam age. It ran from Annesley, north of Nottingham, to Quainton Road (now the Buck inghamshire Railway Centre) and on via the Metropolitan Railway to Harrow-on-the-Hill, from where a new line took the route into Mar ylebone. Beeching saw it as mirroring the Midland Main Line, and his closure notice for the GCR prompted w idespread debate and public protests.
The sections between Rugby and Aylesbur y and between Nottingham and Shef f ield closed during September 3/4, 1966, with the track lifted from Rugby to Calvert. Nottingham Victoria closed on September 4, 1967. While the section between Aylesbur y and Mar ylebone escaped the axe, the only part of the northern section lef t was that between Rugby and Nottingham’s suburban Arkwright Street station – which was first closed in 1963 before one platform reopened for a si x-trains-a-day skeleton DMU ser vice, until it closed again, this time permanent ly, on May 3, 1969. Groups who opposed the loss of the route came toget her for a meeting in a waiting room at Leicester Central, resulting in the formation of the Main Line Preser vation Group in January 1969. The stated aim of these early revivalists was of the whole line from Arkwright Street
