Sir Edward Watkin (1819-1901) was a visionary as well as a highly successful Manchester businessman. He was involved in at least ten railway companies, and was chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway which, as its title implies, ran cross-country from Lancashire to the south bank of the Humber.
Its east-west main line limited its importance and earning-capacity. The Midland Railway had turned itself from a provincial operator to a national main line by building extensions from Derby to London, Manchester and Carlisle in the 1860s and 1870s. Watkin determined to do much more than that, and had the opportunity to make his ideas practical.
As well as the MS&LR, Watkin was a director of the Metropolitan Railway, which reached out from central London to the north-eastern suburbs that eventually became known as Metroland, the East London Railway which controlled the vital cross-river tunnel that Marc and Isambard Brunel had built between 1825 and 1843, the South Eastern Railway which connected London with Folkestone and Dover and – crucially – the Submarine Continental Railway, promoted in 1881 with £250,000 to build the Channel Tunnel. If the Channel Tunnel project had proceeded, Watkin was ready to assist it as a director of the Chemins de fer du Nord company, which connected Calais and Dunkirk with Paris.
To stitch together these separate but connected lines, Watkin resolved to link the MS&LR with the Metropolitan Railway on the outskirts of London. He obtained Parliamentary approval for 94 miles of high-speed track from Annesley Junction in Nottinghamshire, via Nottingham, Loughborough, Leicester and Rugby, and renamed the MS&LR the Great Central Railway.
This undertaking involved engineering construction of the highest contemporary standards. There was only one level crossing on the whole of the new extension. The maximum gradients were 1 in 130 between Annesley and Nottingham, and 1 in 176 south of Nottingham, and no curve was sharper than a one-mile radius.
All the stations were built on island platforms within a formation wide enough for future quadrupling of tracks, and the Marylebone terminus included spare land for additional platforms.
Overbridges and tunnels were designed to accept continental rolling stock, and station-platform copings were removable to allow through running of continental trains if the Victorian Channel Tunnel had ever been built.
The approach to its London terminus at Marylebone was fraught with controversy because the covered-way tunnel had to clip the purlieus of Lord’s cricket ground. The company dug up the Lord’s Nursery Ground and reinstated it on top of the cut-and-cover cutting.
The London Extension was built at a cost of £11,500,000 and opened to traffic in 1899, five years after Sir Edward suffered a stroke which restricted his business activities. The Great Central was well served by its managers and engineers until it was absorbed into the London & North Eastern Railway in 1922, but it never rivalled its competitors as a London main line. Its selling points to passengers were speed – three hours non-stop between London and Sheffield – and luxury, indicated by the publicity strap-line “Rapid Travel in Luxury”. It also made money from coal traffic.
After nationalisation in 1948 the Great Central gradually became surplus to requirements. Express services between Marylebone and Manchester were withdrawn in 1961; ordinary passenger services were finally discontinued in January 1970. Electrically-hauled goods trains between Sheffield, Wath and Manchester finally ended in 1981 and the tracks over Woodhead were lifted.
Though passenger services continue to run east of Manchester, over stretches of the MS&L east of Sheffield and on the approaches to Marylebone, most of the Great Central route is derelict or redeveloped.
Does all this sound familiar? High-speed rail from Manchester to Paris? A race-track of a railway running through open countryside? Over-ambitious redevelopment to make space for a London terminus?
The conversation about High Speed Two dates back to 2009. The arguments about its value have over-emphasised the desirability of shaving journey-times on its route, ignoring the potential benefit of relieving overcrowding on existing Victorian railway routes. A May 2026 report supports this view: HS2 failings blamed on high-speed focus and political pressure – BBC News. (There are, of course, other issues, not least the amount of taxpayers’ money that has gone down the pan.)
Perhaps it would have been more useful to have safeguarded the Great Central trackbed in the 1960s, so that it could be revived as a diversionary route relieving the East and West Coast main lines with fast, but not very fast, passenger and freight services.
Just saying…
