Sunday, July 06, 2014
The last days of Nottingham Victoria
This film was shot on 3 September 1966, the last day that through trains ran from London Marylebone to Nottingham Victoria.
A service between Rugby and Nottingham ran for another three years, but after Victoria closed in 1967 those trains terminated at Nottingham Arkwright Street.
The site of Victoria station is now occupied by a shopping centre. I once overheard one old railwayman telling another that the centre had been designed in such a way that a freight railway could be threaded through the site if the authorities ever changed their minds.
Wishful thinking? Probably, but the decision to close the Great Central seems more misguided as the years pass.
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3 comments:
It's noteworthy how pre-nationalisation railway politics continued well into the 1960s (and maybe beyond). When the Great Central line transferred to the control of the London Midland region, the main line was killed off by neglect in the name of weeding out duplicate routes. How and why the Woodhead line across the Pennines was closed in preference to the Midland route is part of the same story. West of Salisbury the Western region lost no time in singling the line to Exeter and closing the lines west to Cornwall and Plymouth with obvious consequences seen just recently.
How long ago did you hear the railwaymen?
The centre of Nottingham still has most of the tunnels needed - but has been reused for the steam main that runs the city's district heat system.
Just north of the main station the Nottingham Contemporary has probably blocked one end of the tunnel pretty effectively.
Railway tunnels still cut through the north of the city but many of the cuttings have now been filled in with housing estates. The Woodthorpe station has two tower blocks built on it!
The conversation was recent, but they were talking about the era when the Victoria Centre was built.
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