NEW FEBRUARY 2014.  These are extracts from the 1903 edition of Charles Grinling's History of the Great Northern Railway.  He was the son of William Grinling, the GNR's Accountant, and he worked in his father's department at headquarters.  He had access to many of the company's records and so may be relied on. 

Although he presents his history in strict chronological order, the account is much more than a list of happenings and dates: he describes real people, living in the real world of the time.

This is Part 1 of those extracts, covering the period from 1827 until the end of the Eastern Counties Railway in 1862. (Part 2 is File RH025.) Initially the main issue had been competition to provide a line which would serve Lincolnshire thence onward to York, thus tapping into the lucrative traffic from the north to London. Eventually parliament ruled in favour of the GNR line, which would start from Kings Cross: at the time George Hudson was chairman of the ECR, so he then concentrated on cross-lines linking the eastern counties with his midland 'empire' - something which from the Great Northern standpoint looked like efforts to drain their new main line of feeder traffic.

The text from the book is unaltered, but has been put into more modern font and is fully word-searchable.

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