Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway

The Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway (GNGEJR) was a joint railway owned by the Great Northern Railway and its rival, the Great Eastern Railway. It was established in 1879, and the joint company built a line between Spalding and Lincoln to complete a new, primarily freight, route between Cambridge and Doncaster, a distance of about 123 miles. The main purpose was to move Yorkshire coal into East Anglia, a highly profitable enterprise.

The route survives except for the section between March, Cambridgeshire and Spalding, Lincolnshire and the Lincoln by-pass line both of which were closed in the 1980s. The section between Peterborough and Spalding is now regarded as part of the joint line although this is not strictly (historically) accurate.

The line was amalgamation of several existing lines, as well as the construction of some directly as part of the process of opening the joint line, which is described below. The table below records the opening dates in geographic order from south to north.

Before the joint line opened in 1882 there were a number of schemes that preceded it some of which involved a degree of political and legal wrangling based on one company trying to protect its territory and traffic from another. The first scheme in 1834 would have seen a line built from London to Cambridge and then York. This scheme built the line from London to Cambridge in 1836, but it was not until 1844 that the Eastern Counties Railway proposed to build the line from Cambridge to York. In 1846 a bill was presented but it conflicted with a bill presented to Parliament which called for a line from Peterborough to Bawtry (south of Doncaster) via Boston and Lincoln which got parliamentary consent.

In 1847 the Eastern Counties Railway opened a line linking Ely-March and Peterborough although little progress was made on building a line to the north for some years. In 1862 the Eastern Counties Railway was merged to become part of the Great Eastern Railway (GER). The GER was by this point running all lines in East Anglia but was aware that its reliance on passenger and agricultural traffic was never going to bring in significant revenues so once gain looked at extending north with a bill for a railway from March – Spalding was promoted in 1863.

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