Great Central Main Line - Remaining Infrastructure

Remaining Infrastructure

The trackbed of the 40-mile stretch of main line between Calvert and Rugby, closed in 1966, is still intact except for a missing viaduct at Brackley. Proposals for its reopening as part of one scheme or another are made from time to time.

Frequent passenger services run over the joint line between London Marylebone and Aylesbury Vale Parkway, and also between Marylebone and High Wycombe (continuing northwards to Princes Risborough, Bicester North, Banbury and Birmingham Snow Hill). Currently, both these groups of services are operated by Chiltern Railways. Strictly speaking, neither of these routes is specifically of GCR heritage, although the line between Neasden South Junction and Northolt Junction was built, maintained and run by the GCR and is still in use today for all Chiltern services.

A short extension of Chiltern passenger services to a new Aylesbury Vale Parkway railway station on the Aylesbury-Bicester main road opened on 14 December 2008.

In November 2011 HM Government allocated funding for reopening of the section between Bicester and Bletchley (via Claydon Junction), and between Aylesbury Vale Parkway and Claydon Junction, as part of the East West Rail Link scheme, which could see passenger services operating between Reading and Milton Keynes (via Oxford) and between London (Marylebone) and Milton Keynes (via Aylesbury).

Currently, this stretch of route is used for freight consisting of binliner (containerised domestic waste) and spoil trains going to the Calvert Waste Facility (landfill) site at Calvert just south of Calvert station. Five container trains each day use the site: four from Brentford (known as the "Calvert Binliner") and one from Bath and Bristol (known as the "Avon Binliner"). The containers, each of which contains 14 tons of waste, are unloaded at the transfer station onto lorries awaiting alongside which then transport the waste to the landfill site. The site, dating from 1977 and now one of the largest in the country, stretches to 106 hectares and partly reuses the clay pits dug out by Calvert Brickworks which closed in 1991.

In 1969, a group of enthusiasts volunteered to help preserve part of the Great Central. The group took over a stretch of the main line between Loughborough and the northern outskirts of Leicester, and in 1976 started operating as a heritage railway line known as the Great Central Steam Railway. The heritage group remains active to this day. Additionally, a preserved single-track section under the auspices of the Nottingham Transport Heritage Centre at Ruddington is operated with occasional services run by the Great Central Railway (Nottingham). There are plans to relink this section to the adjacent mainline section.

Sections around Rotherham are open for passenger and freight traffic, indeed a new station was built there in the 1980s using the Great Central lines which were closer to the town centre than the former Midland Railway station. Commuter EMU trains run from Hadfield to Manchester via Glossop. These are modern trains using 25 kV overhead wires that were installed to replace the 1500 V system. Daily steel trains run from Sheffield to Deepcar where they feed the nearby Stocksbridge Steelworks owned by Corus Group.