The GCR’s elegant Marylebone station is one of the smallest main line termini in the capital. This September 2007 view shows the porte-cochere providing shelter to the adjacent former railway hotel.
OXYMAN/CC BY-SA 3.0
“TO anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of English railways, it is scarcely a matter for surprise that continual additions are being made to them,” wrote Bertram Fletcher-Robinson. His article for the very first Railway Magazine in July 1897 drew attention to what he called the “senseless opposition” to new railways and “the errors of landowners in our fathers’ and grandfathers’ time” which had made modern additions necessary.
But while Mr Fletcher-Robinson, a respected author who counted literary contemporaries Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and P GWodehouse among his friends, said this meant the majority of new railways were being built for “the shortening of circuitous routes and the opening-up of populous districts often carefully avoided by the main line”, he explained the decision by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway to build a route to London was due to it having no line of its own south of Nottingham.
The MSLR (which would officially become known as the Great Central Railway from August 1, 1897 to reflect its expansion) had hitherto depended on agreements with its competitors for traffic to the capital. For a number of years, the London & North Western Railway’s relationship with the MSLR was a hostile one. The LNWR managed to use contracts for traffic and operational arrangements to its advantage, to frustrate the MSLR’s expansion plans and also its dealings with the Great Northern Railway, with which the MSLR had a more amicable partnership.
A GCR-liveried Class 9N (layer LNER ‘A5’) 4-6-2T, possibly No. 449, leaves Marylebone with a suburban service on an unknown date in the 1910s.
Determined to achieve greater autonomy and retain the proportion of profits that it would otherwise pass on to other companies for carriage of its traffic southwards, it continued to pursue options for a London extension, despite setbacks.
Chairman Sir Edward Watkin (who, for most of his tenure, also held the same position at the South Eastern Railway and Metropolitan Railway) saw the potential of using all three railways to create a link from the North, through London to Dover and ultimately fostered the ambition (albeit unfulfilled until more than 90 years after his death) of constructing a Channel Tunnel.
Setbacks
In an interview in the April 1899 issue of The RM, the GCR’s then general manager William (soon to be Sir William) Pollitt said: “As far back as 1873 the directors of the company recognised the importance of obtaining access to London, and in conjunction with the Midland Company promoted a Bill for the construction of a series of joint lines with a view to securing access to St Pancras station. This was strenuously opposed, and although part of the scheme was passed, the remaining portion between Melton Mowbray and Rushton was rejected, and the Midland Company thereupon decided not to proceed further with the Bill.”
Undeterred, in 1888, the MSLR deposited to Parliament a Bill of its own seeking powers to build a route from Beighton (east of Sheffield) to Chesterfield. Opposed by the Midland Railway, this too was unsuccessful.
A more comprehensive scheme (to which the MR also objected) involving the construction of a line from Beighton to Staveley and Chesterfield and continuing to Annesley in Nottinghamshire, received Royal Assent on July 26, 1889. The line opened in 1892.