Bury St Edmunds railway station
Bury St Edmunds 
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The station entrance
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| Location | |
| Place | Bury St Edmunds |
| Local authority | St Edmundsbury |
| Grid reference | TL852651 |
| Operations | |
| Station code | BSE |
| Managed by | Abellio Greater Anglia |
| Number of platforms | 2 |
| DfT category | C2 |
| Live arrivals/departures, station information and onward connections from National Rail Enquiries |
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| Annual rail passenger usage* | |
| 2011/12 |
 0.488 million |
| – Interchange |
225 |
| 2012/13 |
0.566 million |
| – Interchange |
257 |
| 2013/14 |
0.578 million |
| – Interchange |
310 |
| 2014/15 |
0.596 million |
| – Interchange |
514 |
| 2015/16 |
0.604 million |
| – Interchange |
 380 |
| History | |
| Key dates | Opened 1847 |
| National Rail – UK railway stations | |
| * Annual estimated passenger usage based on sales of tickets in stated financial year(s) which end or originate at Bury St Edmunds from Office of Rail and Road statistics. Methodology may vary year on year. | |
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Bury St Edmunds railway station serves the town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England. The station, and all trains calling there, are operated by Abellio Greater Anglia.
The Ipswich and Bury Railway Company (I&BR), was formed to build a line from Ipswich to Bury St Edmunds. Its Act of 21 July 1845 authorised capital of £400,000 and it shared many shareholders and directors with the Eastern Union Railway (EUR) who were in the process of building their line from Colchester to Ipswich. The companies also shared the same head office location in Brook Street, Ipswich.
The proposed line was 26.5 miles long, with intermediate stations at Bramford, Claydon, Needham, Stowmarket, Haughley Road, Elmswell and Thurston.
The ground breaking ceremony took place in Ipswich on 1 August 1845 where twelve local worthies (including the mayor of Ipswich, engineer Peter Bruff and John Chevallier Cobbold) each filled a wheelbarrow with soil. Building the line was challenging with problems at Ipswich with tunnel construction and at Stowmarket where the local marsh swallowed up a lot of material with test probes finding the bog was 80 feet deep!
On 26 November 1846 the first test train ran to a temporary station at Bury St Edmunds with stops at most stations on the route with the inevitable lavish celebrations. The official opening followed on 7 December 1846 when a special train ran from Shoreditch (later Bishopsgate railway station) to Bury. The Board of Trade inspection took place on 15 December 1846 and the line opened for traffic on 24 December. The existing station at Bury opened in November 1847.
The EUR and I&BR were worked as one from 1 January 1847, and formal amalgamation was obtained by Act of 9 July 1847. The Eastern Union Railway was taken over by the Eastern Counties Railway in 1854. By the 1860s the railways in East Anglia were in financial trouble, and most were leased to the ECR; they wished to amalgamate formally, but could not obtain government agreement for this until 1862, when the Great Eastern Railway was formed by amalgamation. Thus Bury St Edmunds became a GER station in 1862.
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Wikipedia