Great Eastern Railway
The Great Eastern Railway (GER) was a British railway company that existed from 1862 to 1922. Their main route , the Great Eastern Main Line , connected London with Norwich . The GER owned further routes throughout East Anglia . The GER rail network was 1917 km long and the company had an almost complete monopoly in East Anglia for a long time until the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway was founded in 1893.
GER was founded as a merger of the Eastern Counties Railway with numerous smaller companies, including the Norfolk Railway , Eastern Union Railway , Newmarket Railway , Harwich Railway , East Anglian Light Railway and East Suffolk Railway . In 1902, the Northern and Eastern Railway also joined GER.
Major cities served by Liverpool Street terminus in London included Southend-on-Sea , Chelmsford , Colchester , Ipswich , Lowestoft , Great Yarmouth , Norwich , Cambridge and King's Lynn . In addition, the trains ran to seaside resorts such as Hunstanton and Cromer . The GER also operated the suburban traffic in northeast London, with routes to Enfield , Chingford , Loughton and Ilford . The company's main workshops were in Stratford , on the site of what is now Stratford International Station .
The GER also owned and operated a number of ferries between England and the continent. In total there were 42 ships during the company's existence. Even in 1923 a subsidiary was established, the Great Eastern Train Ferries Ltd., 1924 with three from the War Office discarded train ferries - Train Ferry No. 1 , Train Ferry No. 2 and Ferry No. 3 - a rail ferry service for freight traffic between Harwich and Zeebrugge went into operation. This company went into liquidation in 1932 and its ships came to the LNER.
With the entry into force of the Railways Act 1921 on January 1, 1923, GER was combined with six other companies to form the London and North Eastern Railway .
