The Great Central Railway

By Michael A. Vanns

This compelling book centers on the Great Central Railways early history, focusing particularly on its drive to reach London. It follows the subsequent fortunes of the London Extension right up until its closure, and into the preservation era, examining the remarkable achievements of hundreds of enthusiasts and their continuing struggle to fulfill the aspirations of those 1969 visionaries.In 1899 the Great Central Railway opened a new main line between Nottinghamshire and London. It was built to the highest of standards; civil and mechanical engineers able to benefit from the experience of over fifty years of British railway construction. It was a glorious achievement. Yet, despite incorporating some of the best facilities to enable it to operate in a more efficient way than its older rivals, it had a short working life compared to its contemporaries. By the end of the 1960s, most of it had closed. However, ironically, that abandonment by the state-owned British Railways presented an independent and enterprising group of railway enthusiasts with a unique opportunity to operate their own main line with their own engines. In 1969 the Main Line Preservation Group was formed with a vision to re-create a fully functioning, double track, steam-worked main line between Nottingham and Leicester. This book explores the journey, development and changes of the Great Central Railway and is a fantastic guide to how the railway industry has changed over time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473892149

Michael A. Vanns

Michael Vanns was born in Newark-on-Trent in 1956. After studying history and history of art at Leicester University, and a short spell at Tamworth Castle Museum, Michael joined the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in 1978. He remained there until 2009, working on a variety of projects starting with the Elton Collection which examined the Industrial Revolution through contemporary prints, drawings and books. He was involved in museum education and in a number of large Heritage Lottery funded projects, including the refurbishment of the country’s best preserved Victorian decorative tileworks, and the recreation of a small town Victorian street.

Book preview

Preface

This book in the series ‘Heritage Railway Guides’ has been written for all those who want to know something of the story behind Britain’s major heritage railways. It looks at the line taken over by preservationists, putting it into the broader history of the companies that originally built and subsequently ran it. As a guide, it cannot examine every aspect of the railway’s history, and for those who want to delve further there is a selective bibliography.

The last chapter covering the preservation years reflects the views of the author, which might not necessarily coincide with those who have worked, or continue to work, for the organisations mentioned. An almost complete run of ‘Main Line’, the magazine first started by the Main Line Preservation Group and currently issued by the Friends of the Great Central Main Line, has been consulted. No individuals are singled out in this guide for praise or censure. The account focuses on the tangible evidence of what has been achieved since official closure by British Railways, manifest in the appearance of the railway, its structures, the trains, etc since then.

That appearance is the result of all types of activity, both planned and unplanned, by all sorts of people working towards a variety of goals constrained by the resources available, and the rules and regulations that had to be adhered to. Over the years hundreds of people have spent hundreds of hours planning, scheming, negotiating with interested and disinterested parties, fund-raising, working physically hard in sheds, in containers, working outside by the track in all weathers, driving and firing, cleaning, catering and clipping tickets.

This work is dedicated to all those people who have kept the spirit of the Great Central alive.

Gresley-designed 2-6-2 class V2 no. 4771 ‘Green Arrow’ taking water at Loughborough whilst visiting from the National Railway Museum in 2006. (author)

Introduction

Currently, ‘Great Central Railway’ is used in the titles of two stretches of line on which steam-hauled trains are operated regularly for enthusiasts and family visitors. ‘Great Central Railway plc’ runs trains between Loughborough and the northern outskirts of Leicester, and ‘Great Central Railway (Nottingham) Ltd’ operates them from the Nottingham Heritage Centre, Ruddington, to just short of Loughborough.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Great Central Railway was the name bestowed on one of the nation’s major trunk railways, a Company that operated lines stretching from Manchester though Sheffield to the east coast at Immingham, Grimsby and Cleethorpes, to Doncaster and Lincoln, and through the heart of England via Nottingham, Loughborough, Leicester and Rugby to London. Over lines owned jointly with other companies, or by exercising ‘running powers’, Great Central Railway trains reached Aberdeen, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Liverpool, Wigan, St Helens, Birkenhead, Chester, Wrexham, Barnsley, Macclesfield, Oldham, the south coast and Penzance. The Company operated passenger-carrying steamboats to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp, and by 1920 it had a fleet of 1,353 steam locomotives, almost 3,000 carriages and approaching 35,500 freight wagons. Of the hundreds of locomotives it built, one particular design, the 8K Class 2-8-0 of 1911, was chosen for service during both the First and Second World Wars, examples ending up as far away as Australia and the Middle East.

This book looks briefly at the Company’s early history, focusing particularly on its drive to reach London. It then follows the subsequent fortunes of this London Extension, through its abandonment by British Railways in 1969, and into the preservation era. It is a tribute to the hard work of all those involved in this latter part of the story that the section of line south of Loughborough has now been in the care of preservationists longer than it was managed by the original Great Central Railway Company that built it.

The freshly painted signalbox at Quorn & Woodhouse station in January 2016. The structure was originally built in 1890 to control the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway station’s layout at Market Rasen. After it was taken out of use by British Rail and acquired by the preservationists, it was moved in just two sections and re-erected at Quorn in 1984. (Author)

Genesis

On 1 August 1897 the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR) renamed itself the Great Central Railway (GCR). It did this because it was about to complete its new main line to London. The Company had been in existence for fifty years, but for well over thirty years its Chairman had believed that in order to be a truly ‘great’ railway, independent access to London was essential.

For well over a millennium, London has been the capital of the country, the heart of the nation’s Government, its financial hub and the largest settlement in the British Isles. When the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century created new manufacturing and economic powerhouses in the north and the Midlands, London retained its pre-eminent position as Britain’s administrative and banking centre. When a network of canals emerged to improve transportation of raw materials and finished goods within the new manufacturing districts, there was still a need to link that network with London. The capital remained the largest single market within the country for everything the north and Midlands could supply. Completed in 1800, the Grand Junction Canal provided that north–south industrial-revolution link.

Barely thirty years after that feat of civil engineering, another northern innovation was poised to change the face of the whole country. Railways came of age in 1830 when the first inter-city main line was opened between Liverpool and Manchester. It not only proved the viability of the steam locomotive, but also demonstrated there was money to be made in railways. The race was then on to connect the country’s other industrial centres by rail and link them to London.

What emerged as the railway equivalent of the Grand Junction Canal was the London & Birmingham Railway (L&BR). Trains started to run regularly along the whole length of that line in September 1838. As with the Grand Junction Canal, the L&BR was considered at the time to be the main north–south artery into which other lines would naturally be connected. New links were quickly established so that by 1840 it was possible to travel by rail from London Euston Station to Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and York.

The success of all these lines led to a tsunami of railway speculation in the years 1845–6, a period that has become known as the ‘Railway Mania’. Hundreds of railways were promoted in every part of the country, challenging existing monopolies, particularly that of the L&BR, and obliging many existing railway companies to amalgamate in order to defend their territories. One of those important amalgamations was that between the L&BR, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&MR) and the Grand Junction Railway (GJR), forming the London & North Western Railway (LNWR). The other significant grouping of smaller, one-time rival companies, led to the creation of the Midland Railway (MR), centred on Derby. Both these new organisations were implacably opposed to the yet-to-be-built Great Northern Railway (GNR) that in 1846 had gained its Act of Parliament to build a new north–south main-line railway on the eastern side of the country between London and York. Although the GNR was obliged to use other companies’ tracks to