Grimsby District Light Railway

The Grimsby District Light Railway (GDLR) was one of three standard gauge railways, all part of the Great Central Railway, promoted by the latter to connect the wider world to Immingham Dock which it built in the early Twentieth Century on an almost uninhabited, greenfield site on the south bank of the Humber, England.

The three railways were:

All three lines became part of the LNER in 1923 then part of the Eastern Region of British Railways on nationalisation in 1948.

The Barton and Immingham route closed in 1963.

In 2016 the Humber Commercial Railway route remained the port's major artery, carrying imports towards Barnetby and beyond.

By 2016 the GDLR survived, having been renamed the Grimsby Light Single. It was but a shadow of its former self.

The GDLR's immediate purpose was to convey men and materials to the dock workings, with the primary permanent aim of enabling workers to travel between Grimsby and the dock to work. The secondary permanent aim was to enable materials and especially locomotives to transfer between the new engine shed at Immingham and the intensively railway-served port of Grimsby and the railway-promoted seaside resort of Cleethorpes.

The GDLR became a railway with two lines - a conventional light railway used by ordinary trains and an electric tramway which ran parallel to the conventional line for a significant part of its route. This tramway was publicised by the Great Central as the Grimsby District Electric Railway and later by the LNER as the Grimsby and Immingham Electric Railway, by which name it became widely recognised, but legally, all three were one, as set out in a Light Railway Order of 15 January 1906. The two lines were not physically connected.

The conventional line was completed in May 1906, connecting at its south eastern end to the Great Central's Great Coates branch and thereby to the Grimsby to Sheffield Victoria line and the wider world. It was initially single track. At its Immingham end it ended in a field near what would eventually become Immingham East Junction. Lady Henderson performed the ceremonial cutting of the first sod for the massive Immingham Dock undertaking near this spot on 12 July 1906, with the VIP party brought to the site in the GCR directors' saloon and lesser guests brought in open wagons, spruced up for the occasion. Both trains used the GDLR.

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