Cambridge to Mildenhall railway

The Cambridge to Mildenhall railway is a closed railway between Cambridge and Mildenhall in England. It was built by the Great Eastern Railway, and opened in two stages, in 1894 and 1895.

Traversing thinly populated agricultural terrain, it was not heavily used. The GER introduced cost-saving measures on passenger trains, including push and pull trains and a conductor-guard system, and in 1922 opened three very basic lineside halts.

The passenger service on the line was discontinued in 1962 and except for a short stub, the line was closed completely in 1965. There is no railway use of the former route now.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth the area later served by the Mildenhall branch was productive of agricultural produce. The villages to the west of Fordham relied on lodes to connect waterborne transport to the River Great Ouse. Mildenhall itself, lying to the east of Fordham, used the River Lark as its transport artery. There was no satisfactory road network at this time, and the water transport was used universally, although it was slow, and imperfect for the conveyance of food crops.

In the 1840s the easy money of the Railway Mania encouraged numerous railway schemes in the area, and Cambridge was connected to the railway network in 1845 as part of a scheme to link London and Norwich. From July 1862 the Great Eastern Railway was formed, taking over all of the former individual concerns in the area.

At that time there was the main line from Cambridge to Ely and King's Lynn, the old Eastern Counties Railway line from Ely to Norwich, and the former Newmarket Railway lines from Cambridge and Great Chesterford to Bury St Edmunds. The speed and efficiency of the railways enhanced the feeling that Mildenhall, not connected to the network, was at a disadvantage.

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