The Norfolk Railway was an early railway company that controlled a network of 94 miles around Norwich, England. It was formed in 1845 by the amalgamation of the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway opened in 1844, and the Norwich and Brandon Railway, not yet opened. These lines were built out of frustration that the Eastern Counties Railway line that was expected to connect Norwich to London failed to be completed. The Norfolk Railway also leased the Lowestoft Railway and Harbour Company, and built a branch to Dereham and Fakenham, opened in 1846 and 1849 respectively.
It was successful in connecting Norwich to the emerging railway network, by connecting at Brandon with a line from London via Cambridge and also a line from the Midlands through Peterborough. However as a local line it was dependent on bigger partners, and it was threatened by new competing lines, so that its independence was always at risk. In 1848 it agreed with the larger Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) that the ECR would operate its line, reducing the Norfolk Railway to a financial company only. In 1862 the Norfolk Railway amalgamated with other companies to form the Great Eastern Railway.
Its first lines, from Great Yarmouth to Norwich and Norwich to Brandon, continue in use at the present day as important regional routes, and although the Dereham and Fakenham branch closed to passengers in the 1960s, the majority of this line remains open as the Mid-Norfolk Railway.
Yarmouth and Norwich Railway
The merchants of Norwich had been gratified when the Eastern Counties Railway got its authorising act of Parliament, the Eastern Counties Railway Act 1836 (6 & 7 Will. 4. c. cvi), to build a line from London to their city and on to Great Yarmouth. The capital for the construction was £1.6 million,George Dow, The First Railway in Norfolk, published by the London and North Eastern Railway, second edition, 1947 a huge amount at the time. The Eastern Counties Railway had grossly underestimated the cost of building its line, and it was running out of money. The people of Norwich were dismayed in April 1839, when the ECR announced that it would be unable to build any further than Colchester for the time being.John Barney, The Norfolk Railway: Railway Mania in East Anglia, Mintaka Books, Norwich, 2007, D I Gordon, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain: volume 5: the Eastern Counties, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1977, Cecil J Allen, The Great Eastern Railway, Ian Allan, Shepperton, fifth edition 1968Hugh Moffat, East Anglia's first railways, Terence Dalton Limited, Lavenham, 1987,
Throughout the remainder of that year and in 1840, a number of schemes were put forward and discussed; there were alternative routes, but they all met with the suspicion that large sums of money might be subscribed without the lines being completed. By now the Northern and Eastern Railway was in financial difficulty too; its original intention of connecting London to York was eventually reduced to a line from Stratford to Newport, Essex. Ambitious railway schemes in East Anglia were not held in high esteem, especially when their projected cost was quoted in millions of pounds.
On 21 January 1841, a meeting was held in Norwich to determine how to improve the transport links of Norwich. As a first step, a link to Yarmouth was planned. Yarmouth was the port for the City of Norwich, and at the same time a fashionable watering place, and would be useful, as coastwise shipping was an important transport medium for heavy materials, particularly coal, and the railway would enable minerals to be brought to Norwich from the harbour at Yarmouth. The ECR powers to build between Norwich and Yarmouth had lapsed by this time, but at a meeting on 19 March 1841 a proposal was tabled, prepared by Robert Stephenson, for a line. It was to be routed indirectly, via Reedham, to minimise the cost by avoiding certain river crossings and keeping to low-lying ground: it became known as the Valley Line. It would cost a little under £200,000 including land acquisition and rolling stock.
The project went to the 1842 session of Parliament, and in the face of Eastern Counties Railway opposition, the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway Act 1842 (5 & 6 Vict. c. lxxxii) passed on 18 June 1842. George Stephenson was the chairman of the company and Robert Stephenson the engineer.<ref name = barney/. Share capital was £150,000.E F Carter, An Historical Geography of the Railways of the British Isles, Cassell, London, 1959
Grissell and Peto were appointed as the contractors; they had agreed to take £30,000 of their fee in shares; they started work in late March 1843. There proved to be a difficulty over the Yarmouth terminus, which was planned to be on an island owned by Robert Cory. The only access was over a primitive and narrow suspension toll bridge, and there were covenants preventing anyone from building a further access bridge. The issue was not resolved by the time the line opened, and at first arriving passengers were ferried across the River Bure. Cory objected to that, stating that he had the monopoly on ferry crossings as well, and the matter went to court.
On 12 April 1844 the line was nearly complete and a special train was run over the line, conveying, among others, General Pasley of the Board of Trade. There was a ceremonial opening on 30 April 1844, followed by the full public opening on 1 May 1844. There were seven passenger trains each way daily, four of which were non-stop trains completing the journey in 45 minutes; there were five intermediate stations. The Yarmouth terminus later became known as Yarmouth Vauxhall. For some time at the beginning, there were no goods or mineral trains; in fact this service was delayed until the Brandon connection was finished. The company contracted out the operation of its trains to George Merrett, Peto's agent during the construction, for £7,000 a year.
The Yarmouth and Norwich Railway was the first in the country to adopt electric telegraph block working from its beginning. Neele described the signalling arrangements:
The stations intermediate between Reedham and Norwich were very primitive and small; the mode of signalling as simple as could well be devised. A lofty pole at the station platform was furnished with a circular creel or basket, painted red. If this was pulled to the top of the pole, the train was to stop. Semaphores and distant signals were unknown on the Line, but while this was the case with signals, the telegraphing of train progress was in advance of any system in vogue at that time on any other line, or indeed at the present day, for standing in the foreman's office at Norwich, it was easy to observe the signals which indicated, by large deflected needles, the passage of the going or coming train at Norwich, Brandon Junction, Brundall, Reedham. and Yarmouth, respectively.George P Neele, Railway Reminiscences, McCorquodale & Co., London, 1904
Carter states that "the Yarmouth and Norwich for many years held the railway 'sprint' record of one mile in 44 seconds."
Norwich and Brandon Railway
Authorisation of the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway had gone through smoothly, and thoughts in Norwich turned to connecting the city to the emerging railway network. Much of the September 1843 shareholders' meeting of the Yarmouth and Norwich company was taken up with discussion of possible extensions. Samuel Morton Peto said that if they built a line to Brandon, 40 miles to the west, then the existing railways would compete to join it at Brandon, so completing a through connection to the other lines. The choice of Brandon must have been the result of private negotiations with some or all of the other railways that might join up there.Brandon is also just across the border from Norfolk into Suffolk.
In September 1843 a notice appeared in the press making this objective plain:
Norwich and Brandon Railway: A prospectus has this week been issued for the formation of a railway, in extension of the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway, commencing near the terminus in this city [Norwich], and running to Brandon, a distance of thirty miles... from Brandon, the country is... favourable for the construction of lines to communicate with the branch of the London and Birmingham Railway at Peterborough, with the Eastern Counties railway at Colchester, and with the Northern and Eastern railway at Newport, the distance in each case being the same, viz., about 40 miles. By the construction of this railway, it is anticipated, Norwich, Yarmouth, and the county of Norfolk, will be ultimately connected, not only with the metropolis but with the Midland and Northern counties, and the manufacturing districts, as, no doubt, extension lines, to connect it with the above-mentioned railways, would speedily be obtained by the respective companies, who have already expressed their desire to co-operate with the promoters of the undertaking; and, with that object, some of them are now actually employed in making surveys.Norfolk Chronicle, 23 September 1843
An 8% return would, it was claimed, be achieved on the present volume of traffic, but a "great increase of income" would be secured "on the ultimate completion of a line to Peterborough, or to Colchester, or Newport" by attracting traffic from coastal shipping. The capital to be raised was £300,000.
The London and Birmingham Railway was not induced to extend its Peterborough branch to Brandon, and the Eastern Counties Railway had stalled at Colchester. Nevertheless the Northern and Eastern Railway had got as far as Bishops Stortford and an extension of that to Brandon by way of Cambridge and Ely was feasible. Accordingly the Norwich and Brandon Railway went ahead and it secured the Norwich and Brandon Railway Act 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. xv) on 10 May 1844.
Eastern Counties Railway to Brandon The Eastern Counties Railway had been authorised on 4 July 1836 to construct a railway from London to Great Yarmouth by way of Ipswich and Norwich. At the time of authorisation this was a huge scheme: 126 miles of railway at a cost of £1.6 million, and it turned out that the project was considerably underestimated. The ECR only reached Colchester, and ran out of money, and for the time being the project finished there.
The Northern and Eastern Railway had built a line from London to Bishop's Stortford, using the ECR London terminus. It had originally intended to build a line from London to York by way of Cambridge, but that too proved to be unachievable, and its authorised route was cut back to reaching from London to Newport, Essex. The ECR worked the trains on the N&ER, which was also seriously short of money. On 1 January 1844 the Eastern Counties Railway secured a 999-year lease of the N&ER. The N&ER had only reached Bishop's Stortford, but at the time of the lease it was in the course of constructing on to its authorised northern extremity at Newport, a distance of about 9 miles.
When the Norwich and Brandon Railway was being promoted, the ECR saw that a continuation from Newport to Brandon would not only include the important regional centre of Cambridge, but give it a through route to Norwich via Ely. This was a more attractive proposition than trying to revive the Colchester to Norwich route, so the ECR went to Parliament for the necessary powers to build to Brandon, to meet the Norwich and Brandon Railway there; the Eastern Counties Railway Company (Ely, Brandon and Peterborough Extension) Act 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. lxii) authorising the project was given royal assent on 4 July 1844.Gordon, page 105; Allen says 4 June 1844, page 13.
Cory's bridge at Yarmouth The Yarmouth suspension bridge owned by Cory was the only fixed access from the railway station to the town, crossing the Bure, and the railway company had been unable to secure powers to by-pass it. On 2 May 1845 the bridge collapsed under a crowd of people, and more than a hundred drowned: