In the Beeching era, the term ‘rail replacement bus’ would immediately conjure up visions of lines being permanently closed and wiped off the map. Sixty years on, the role was reversed as a fleet of heritage London Transport Routemaster buses linked the Great Central Railway at Loughborough with its northern counterpart the Great Central Railway (Nottingham) during a unique ‘gala in a million’ to celebrate 125 years since the last trunk route into the capital before the coming of High Speed 1, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, was opened.
It was on March 15, 1899, that the first passenger trains on the Great Central Railway between Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester and Marylebone ran, the work of the ‘Railway King’ Sir Edward Watkin (1819-1901), who also turned Canada's Trunk Railway into the longest in the world, dug two miles of the first Channel tunnel in 1880, and created Cleethorpes as a holiday resort, among many other achievements.
In its early years, the Great Central's steam-hauled Sheffield expresses were the fastest in the country. However, the express services from London to destinations beyond Nottingham were withdrawn in 1960, and the Beeching report three years later said that the
