The Great Central Main Line (GCML), also known as the London Extension of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR), is a former railway line which opened in 1899 linking Sheffield with Marylebone Station in London via Nottingham and Leicester.
The GCML was the last main line railway built in Britain during the Victorian period, and it was not initially a financial success, only recovering under the leadership of Sam Fay. Though initially planned largely with long-distance passenger services in mind, in practice the line's most important function became to carry goods traffic, notably coal.
In the 1960s, the line was viewed by Doctor Beeching as an unnecessary duplication of other lines which served the same places, especially the Midland Main Line and to a lesser extent the West Coast Main Line. Most of the route was closed between 1966 and 1969 under the Beeching axe.
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The GCML was very much a strategic line in concept. It was not intended to duplicate the Midland line by serving a great many centres of population. Instead it was intended to link the MS&LR's system stretching across northern England directly to London at as high a speed as possible and with a minimum of stops and connections: thus much of its route ran through sparsely populated countryside.
Starting at Annesley in Nottinghamshire, and running for 92 miles (147 km) in a relatively direct southward route, it left the crowded corridor through Nottingham (and Nottingham Victoria railway station), which was also used by the Midland and the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), then struck off to its new railway station at Leicester Central, passing Loughborough en route, where it crossed the Midland main line. Four railway companies served Leicester: GCR, Midland, GNR, and LNWR. Avoiding Wigston, the GCR served the town of Lutterworth (the only town on the GC not to be served by another railway company) before reaching the town of Rugby (at Rugby Central Station), where it crossed at right-angles over, and did not connect with, the West Coast Main Line.
It continued southwards to Woodford Halse, where there was a connection with the East and West Junction Railway (later incorporated into the Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway), and slightly further south the GCR branch to the Great Western Railway station at Banbury. From Woodford Halse the route continued in a roughly south-easterly direction via Brackley to Calvert and Quainton Road, where Great Central trains joined the Metropolitan (later joint Metropolitan and Great Central) route via Aylesbury into London.
Partly because of disagreements with the Metropolitan Railway (MetR) over use of their tracks at the southern end of the route, the company built the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway joint line (1906) from Grendon Underwood to Ashendon Junction, by-passing the greater part of the MetR's tracks.
Apart from a small freight branch to Gotham between Nottingham and Loughborough, and the "Alternative Route" link added later (1906), these were the only branch lines from the London extension. Although the line crossed several other railways, there were few physical connections.
North of Sheffield, express trains on the London extension made use of the pre-existing MS&LR trans-Pennine main line, the Woodhead Line (now also closed) to give access to Manchester.
In 1864 Sir Edward Watkin took over directorship of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. He had grand ambitions for the company: he had plans to transform it from a provincial middle-of-the-road railway company into a major national player. Watkin was a visionary who wanted to build a new railway line that would not only link his network to London, but which one day would be expanded and link to a future Channel Tunnel (although this ultimate ambition was never realised). He grew tired of handing over potentially lucrative London-bound traffic to rivals, and, after several attempts to co-build a line to London with other companies, decided that the MS&LR needed to create its own route to the capital. At the time many people questioned the wisdom of building the line, as all the significant population centres which the line traversed were already served by other companies. In 1897 The MS&LR changed its name to the grander sounding Great Central Railway to reflect its new-found national ambitions.
In the 1890s the MS&LR set about building its own line, having received Parliamentary approval on 28 March 1893, for the London Extension. Building work started in 1895: the line opened for passenger traffic on 15 March 1899, and for goods traffic on 11 April 1899. The London extension was the last mainline railway line to be built in Britain until section one of High Speed 1 opened in 2003. It was also the shortest-lived intercity railway line. The new line, 92 miles (147 km) in length, was built from Annesley in Nottinghamshire to join the existing Metropolitan Railway (MetR) Extension at Quainton Road where the line became joint MetR/GCR owned and returned to GCR metals at Harrow for the final section to Marylebone.
Features of the line were:
The cost of building the line was huge and overran its original budget of £3.5 million by a factor of three. In order to get permission to build the line the Company had to agree to put parts of the line through tunnels to avoid upsetting the local land owners, this was especially true of Catesby Tunnel in Northamptonshire and St. John's Wood Tunnel in London. It was so expensive that the original plans for their London terminus at Marylebone had to be scaled back drastically.
The London Extension's main competitor was the Midland Railway which had served the route between London, the East Midlands and Sheffield since the 1860s on a different route. Traffic was slow to establish itself on the new line, passenger traffic especially so. Enticing customers away from the established lines into London was more difficult than the GCR's builders had hoped. However, there was some success in appealing to higher-class 'business' travellers in providing high-speed luxurious trains. These were in a way the first long-distance commuter trains. Passenger traffic was never heavy throughout the line's existence, but freight traffic grew healthily and became the lifeblood of the line, the staples being coal, iron ore, and fish and banana trains.
Nevertheless, in the late-1930s heyday of fast long-distance passenger steam trains, there were six crack expresses a day from Marylebone to Sheffield, calling at Leicester and Nottingham, and going forward to Manchester. Some of these achieved a London-Sheffied timing of 3 hours and 6 minutes in 1939, making them fully competitive with the rival Midland service out of St Pancras as far as journey time was concerned.[1]
The First World War, and the hostile European political climate which followed, ended any possibility of a Channel Tunnel being constructed within the GCR's lifetime. The various Channel Tunnel schemes, including one in 1883 which prompted Sir Edward Watkin and the MS&LR to construct the London extension, foundered on the fear of French invasion. Further work in the 1920s was again vetoed for similar reasons. The extension was therefore seen has having lost some of its original raison d'etre. In the 1923 Grouping the Great Central Railway was merged into the London and North Eastern Railway, which in 1948 was nationalised along with the rest of Britain's railway network.
From the late 1950s onwards the freight traffic upon which the line relied started to decline, and the GCR route was largely neglected as other railway lines were thought to be more important. It was designated a duplicate of the Midland Main Line and in 1958 transferred from the management of the Eastern Region to the London Midland Region, whose management still had loyalties to former companies (Midland/LMS) and against their rivals GCR/LNER.
In January 1960, express passenger services from London to Sheffield and Manchester were discontinued, leaving only three "semi-fast" London-Nottingham trains per day. In March 1963 local trains on many parts of the route were cancelled and many rural local stations were closed. However, at this time it was still hoped that better use of the route could be made for parcels and goods traffic.[2]
In the 1960s Beeching era, Dr Beeching decided that the London to northern England route was already well served by other lines, to which most of the traffic on the GCR could be diverted. Closure came to be seen as inevitable.
The sections between Rugby and Aylesbury and between Nottingham and Sheffield were closed in 1966, leaving only an unconnected stub between Rugby and Nottingham, on which a skeleton shuttle service operated. This last stretch was closed in May 1969.
The closure of the GCR was the largest single closure of the Beeching era, and one of the most controversial. In a letter published in the Daily Telegraph on 28 September 1965, Denis Anthony Brian Butler, 9th Earl of Lanesborough, a peer and railway supporter, wrote:
| “ | [Among] the main lines in the process of closure, surely the prize for idiotic policy must go to the destruction of the until recently most profitable railway per ton of freight and per passenger carried in the whole British Railways system, as shown by their own operating statistics. These figures were presented to monthly management meetings until the 1950s, when they were suppressed as "unnecessary", but one suspects really "inconvenient" for those proposing Beeching type policies of unnecessarily severe contraction of services [...] This railway is of course the Great Central forming a direct Continental loading gauge route from Sheffield and the North to the Thames valley and London for Dover and France [...].[3] | ” |
The line features in the opening sequence of the 1965 Michael Caine film "The Ipcress File" where a soon-to-be-abducted scientist is seen boarding a train at Marylebone Station announced as being for "Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield".
A new company founded in 1991, Central Railway Ltd, proposed to re-open the GCR largely as a freight link following completion of the Channel Tunnel rail link. These proposals face financial, environmental and social difficulties and were rejected by Parliament twice.[4]
The trackbed of the 40-mile stretch of main line between Calvert and Rugby, closed in 1966, is still intact except for a missing viaduct at Brackley. Proposals for its reopening as part of one scheme or another are made from time to time.
Frequent passenger services run over the joint line between London Marylebone and Aylesbury Vale Parkway, and also between Marylebone and High Wycombe (continuing northwards to Princes Risborough, Bicester North, Banbury and Birmingham Snow Hill). Currently, both these groups of services are operated by Chiltern Railways. Strictly speaking, neither of these routes is specifically of GCR heritage, although the line between Neasden South Junction and Northolt Junction was built, maintained and run by the GCR and is still in use today for all Chiltern services.
A short extension of Chiltern passenger services to a new Aylesbury Vale Parkway railway station on the Aylesbury-Bicester main road opened on 14 December 2008.[5]
There are proposals to open the section from Aylesbury Parkway to Claydon Junction as part of the East West Rail Link scheme, which would see passenger services operating between London (Marylebone) and Milton Keynes.[6]
Currently, this stretch of route is used for freight consisting of binliner (containerised domestic waste) and spoil trains going to the Calvert Waste Facility (landfill) site at Calvert just south of Calvert station. Five container trains each day use the site: four from Brentford (known as the "Calvert Binliner") and one from Bath and Bristol (known as the "Avon Binliner"). The containers, each of which contains 14 tons of waste, are unloaded at the transfer station onto lorries awaiting alongside which then transport the waste to the landfill site.[7] The site, dating from 1977 and now one of the largest in the country, stretches to 106 hectares and partly reuses the clay pits dug out by Calvert Brickworks which closed in 1991.[8]
In 1969, a group of enthusiasts volunteered to help preserve part of the Great Central. The group took over a stretch of the main line between Loughborough and the northern outskirts of Leicester, and in 1976 started operating as a heritage railway line known as the Great Central Steam Railway. The heritage group remains active to this day. Additionally, a preserved single-track section under the auspices of the Nottingham Transport Heritage Centre at Ruddington is operated with occasional services run by the Great Central Railway (Nottingham). There are plans to relink this section to the adjacent mainline section.
Sections around Rotherham are open for passenger and freight traffic, indeed a new station was built there in the 1980s using the Great Central lines which were closer to the town centre than the former Midland Railway station. Commuter EMU trains run from Hadfield to Manchester via Glossop. These are modern trains using 25 kV overhead wires that were installed to replace the 1500 V system. Daily steel trains run from Sheffield to Deepcar where they feed the nearby Stocksbridge Steelworks owned by Corus Group.
In March 2010 the government announced plans for a future high-speed railway between London and Birmingham that would re-use about 12 miles of the GCR route. The proposed line would parallel the current Aylesbury line (former Met/GCR joint) corridor and then continue alongside the GCR line between Quainton Road and Calvert. From there it would follow the disused but still extant GCR trackbed via Finmere as far as Brackley before diverging on a new alignment towards Birmingham.
There is an unfunded proposal to re-open the section of track from Aylesbury Parkway to a potentially re-opened Varsity Line as part of the proposed East West Rail Link.
Chiltern Railways has a long-term plan to reopen the Great Central Main Line north of Aylesbury as far as Rugby[9] and onward at a later stage to Leicester.
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