Greater Anglia name

ScottGallagher · 16 Nov 2019

It may have been been asked before long ago but is there a reason why the dft mandated that name for the franchise and not Great Eastern Railway or similar which would surely be more appropriate? What about Essex !

RailUK Forums

CNash · 16 Nov 2019

I'd guess it would have invited confusion with the East Coast Main Line - itself a little confusing as it's not on the coast until it gets closer to Scotland. Whereas the Anglia, East Anglia, West Anglia etc. franchise regions all combined together form "Greater Anglia" on the Great Eastern line...

306024 · 16 Nov 2019

Great Eastern Railway would indeed have been the most appropriate, given other franchise names elsewhere. There is always some debate as to the precise geographical boundary of East Anglia, and until the WA&GN franchise was invented I can’t recall anyone referring to ‘West Anglia’. The routes out of Liverpool St usually being referred to as the Great Eastern Main Line (via Colchester) or simply the Cambridge Main Line.

Greater Anglia kind of describes the area, in that it is greater than just Anglia, but it’s a bit of a naff name. Most railway folks I’ve worked with still call it the GE.

w0033944 · 16 Nov 2019

306024 said:
Great Eastern Railway would indeed have been the most appropriate, given other franchise names elsewhere. There is always some debate as to the precise geographical boundary of East Anglia, and until the WA&GN franchise was invented I can’t recall anyone referring to ‘West Anglia’. The routes out of Liverpool St usually being referred to as the Great Eastern Main Line (via Colchester) or simply the Cambridge Main Line.

Greater Anglia kind of describes the area, in that it is greater than just Anglia, but it’s a bit of a naff name. Most railway folks I’ve worked with still call it the GE.

Absolutely. I'm not sure that there is a definition of 'West Anglia' beyond that it often refers to Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, the old county of Huntingdonshire, and possibly Hertfordshire.

387star · 16 Nov 2019

West anglia main line is a name of a line though

swt_passenger · 16 Nov 2019

I’m not so sure the DfT specified the trading name. Everything on DfT’s rail franchising index page refers to it as the East Anglia franchise:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/rail-franchising#east-anglia-franchise
So the original question should be posed to the franchisee, whose legal name is:
...Abellio East Anglia Limited. Abellio East Anglia Limited is a company registered in England and Wales etc.

306024 · 16 Nov 2019

That’s right. Had First been allowed to bid for what became National Express East Anglia, it could well have become GER had they won.

387star said:
West anglia main line is a name of a line though

It is amongst many people now, but never heard it called that in BR days.

65477 · 16 Nov 2019

w0033944 said:
Absolutely. I'm not sure that there is a definition of 'West Anglia' beyond that it often refers to Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, the old county of Huntingdonshire, and possibly Hertfordshire.

In another field East Anglia is part of the focus of my studies and it refers to the Eastern Lands occupied by the angles. There were three angle kingdoms, East, Mercia and Northumberland. Thus if West Anglia did exist is was around Birmingham!, although this is sometimes called Middle Anglia.

flitwickbeds · 16 Nov 2019

306024 said:
There is always some debate as to the precise geographical boundary of East Anglia...

w0033944 said:
Absolutely. I'm not sure that there is a definition of 'West Anglia' beyond that it often refers to Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, the old county of Huntingdonshire, and possibly Hertfordshire.

Growing up in (eastern) Northamptonshire and now residing in (mid) Bedfordshire it's always fascinating how differently these two counties are categorised by different organisations/companies/websites.

Bedfordshire especially can be found variously under East, South-East, Anglia, Midlands, East Midlands or sometimes Greater London!

leytongabriel · 16 Nov 2019

flitwickbeds said:
Growing up in (eastern) Northamptonshire and now residing in (mid) Bedfordshire it's always fascinating how differently these two counties are categorised by different organisations/companies/websites.

Bedfordshire especially can be found variously under East, South-East, Anglia, Midlands, East Midlands or sometimes Greater London!

And Central Southern England ?

bramling · 16 Nov 2019

306024 said:
Great Eastern Railway would indeed have been the most appropriate, given other franchise names elsewhere. There is always some debate as to the precise geographical boundary of East Anglia, and until the WA&GN franchise was invented I can’t recall anyone referring to ‘West Anglia’. The routes out of Liverpool St usually being referred to as the Great Eastern Main Line (via Colchester) or simply the Cambridge Main Line.

Greater Anglia kind of describes the area, in that it is greater than just Anglia, but it’s a bit of a naff name. Most railway folks I’ve worked with still call it the GE.

NSE certainly referred to “West Anglia” as one of their route brandings - indeed I distinctly remember some class 317s carrying that. I always assumed that “West Anglia Great Northern” was simply an opportunistic combination of the two NSE brands, similar to the way many of the initial privatisation shadow TOCs took their names from NSE.

To muddy things further the outer suburban west Anglia side of WAGN was branded as “Heron Line” for a time in the late 1990s, but this doesn’t seem to have stuck.

I agree Great Eastern Railway would be a much better name for GA. Could there be a complication that we’ve already had a GER franchise in the past?

jopsuk · 17 Nov 2019

"West Anglia" is very much an

flitwickbeds said:
Growing up in (eastern) Northamptonshire and now residing in (mid) Bedfordshire it's always fascinating how differently these two counties are categorised by different organisations/companies/websites.

Bedfordshire especially can be found variously under East, South-East, Anglia, Midlands, East Midlands or sometimes Greater London!

For governmental/EU purposes, Bedfordshire is in the East Of England and Northamptonshire is in the East Midlands

jopsuk · 17 Nov 2019

bramling said:
NSE certainly referred to “West Anglia” as one of their route brandings - indeed I distinctly remember some class 317s carrying that. I always assumed that “West Anglia Great Northern” was simply an opportunistic combination of the two NSE brands, similar to the way many of the initial privatisation shadow TOCs took their names from NSE.

To muddy things further the outer suburban west Anglia side of WAGN was branded as “Heron Line” for a time in the late 1990s, but this doesn’t seem to have stuck.

Well, the NSE logo for West Anglia was a Heron:

306024 · 17 Nov 2019

Yes thinking back West Anglia must have existed in NSE days for it to become the combination of WA&GN. And there’s the photographic proof (from a wall in Ilford depot?, they had some logos displayed there) Didn’t work on that side then for long, but did have a heron tie.

There was First Great Eastern, but not a Great Eastern Railway. But again to confuse the logo used was GER, the E being the Essex seaxes (swords).

I remember being told South Wast Trains was chosen rather than South Western Railway specifically because Railtrack were responsible for the ‘Railway’, the TOC just did the trains bit.

ScottGallagher · 17 Nov 2019

Thanks all for the replies it's all very interesting, maybe next time round it will be renamed !

387star · 17 Nov 2019

I like the rabbit branding or are they hares

PG · 17 Nov 2019

306024 said:
I remember being told South Wast Trains was chosen rather than South Western Railway specifically because Railtrack were responsible for the ‘Railway’, the TOC just did the trains bit.

Sounds quite sensible when you put it like that.

DfT obviously decided that it wasn't a good idea as AnywhereTrains is now AnywhereRailway

At the risk of going slightly OT following DfT logic (or lack of) that leaves the question of what does NetworkRail now do?!!

tom73 · 17 Nov 2019

Happy childhood memories ... until ITV took away our Anglia TV to give us Yorkshire TV instead, and we weren't even in Yorkshire.

w0033944 · 17 Nov 2019

flitwickbeds said:
Growing up in (eastern) Northamptonshire and now residing in (mid) Bedfordshire it's always fascinating how differently these two counties are categorised by different organisations/companies/websites.

Bedfordshire especially can be found variously under East, South-East, Anglia, Midlands, East Midlands or sometimes Greater London!

I always think of Northants as being East Midlands, with Bedforshire being Anglia, but not EA.

w0033944 · 17 Nov 2019

65477 said:
In another field East Anglia is part of the focus of my studies and it refers to the Eastern Lands occupied by the angles. There were three angle kingdoms, East, Mercia and Northumberland. Thus if West Anglia did exist is was around Birmingham!, although this is sometimes called Middle Anglia.

Interesting - so can we call Mercia "West Anglia"?

PG · 17 Nov 2019

The College of West Anglia is based in three locations... I'd go with Milton and at a push maybe Wisbech being in West Anglia but King's Lynn too :rolleyes:

https://cwa.ac.uk/about said:
Our campuses in King's Lynn, Wisbech and Milton demonstrate state-of-the-art facilities, providing environments and equipment of the standard you would experience in the workplace.

https://cwa.ac.uk/about

fairysdad · 17 Nov 2019

What has often confused me about the name is the Greater Anglia part of the name - greater than what?

Merle Haggard · 17 Nov 2019

w0033944 said:
I always think of Northants as being East Midlands EA.

The term 'Midlands' was not a shortening of 'Middle-lands' but was 'Mead-lands', mead an older word for meadow. Meadow lands were those alongside slow running rivers like the Nene, which only falls 180' from Northampton to the Wash.

Midlands originally referred to the area centred on Northampton.

Obviously with the passage of time the meaning has changed, but unfortunately it has left the three Shire counties without a generic description.

ScottGallagher · 17 Nov 2019

Had First won the franchise in 2004, is it fair to assume the WAGN and Anglia bit of the enlarged franchise would be absorbed in to the First Great Eastern name already prevalent? I guess we will never know

PG · 17 Nov 2019

fairysdad said:
What has often confused me about the name is the Greater Anglia part of the name - greater than what?

Greater than Anglia I think.

See Greater Manchester, Greater London.

Jamiescott1 · 17 Nov 2019

I still think of it as first great eastern, as this is what it was when I grew up (with the franchise made up of 3 different franchises at the time)

The town I lived in even had a night club next to the station called Easterns which was on great eastern road

The only Anglia branded trains we got were the intercity that stopped at colchester, the exotic ones that went round north London and the single carriage one that great eastern borrowed for Mark's tey - sudbury

dk1 · 18 Nov 2019

One of the better titles would be the old NX trading name which was 'London Eastern Railway' but then the simple & 1997-2004 used 'Anglia Railways' would encompass everything very nicely.

James H · 18 Nov 2019

I always thought that the Greater Anglia came about because it followed on from the Greater Western franchise consolidation (bringing together commuter, InterCity and regional) in the west.

Whereas GW already had the Great as part of the name, so Great(er) was a more natural extension, there was no such thing as Great Anglia, so the name sounded more awkward when used on the Liverpool Street franchise.

flitwickbeds · 18 Nov 2019

w0033944 said:
I always think of Northants as being East Midlands, with Bedforshire being Anglia, but not EA.

Both counties are served by BBC Look East (rather than East Midlands today, which serves the next county up, Leicestershire). Buckinghamshire (in which resides Milton Keynes, my nearest big town from where I live in Bedfordshire) is served by the South Today programme, despite being covered on radio by Three Counties (Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire).

Northamptonshire is represented by an East Midlands region MEP in the EU Parliament, while Bedfordshire is served by an Eastern region MEP. Buckinghamshire is served by an MEP in the South-East region group.

Meanwhile random websites categorise them almost randomly. As an example on holidaycottages.com you'll find Northamptonshire and Hertfordshire under Heart of England (along with Cheshire and Herefordshire) but Bedfordshire in East of England.

dorsetdesiro · 18 Nov 2019

I can understand why "Greater Anglia" was chosen as it covers both West Anglia & East Anglia parts, both previously served by separate TOCs, bringing the two together under one umbrella. They could have chosen "Anglia Trains" or "Anglia Railways" (like the defunct TOC).

I was intrigued by reading from elsewhere by the fact "Greater Anglia" wasn't chosen by Abellio however by the DfT.

As the DfT had a "thing" for traditional names, why "Great Eastern Railway" wasn't chosen I don't know. I presume this was before Grayling's tenure and now he is no longer the Sec, and it is looking likely that West Coast would be branded as "Avanti" instead of "LMSR".
The renaming of SWT to SWR, LM to LNR, EMT to EMR and VTEC to LNER all happened under Grayling's watch.

Then the "Greater Anglia" name could still continue, even if it changes hands from Abellio to whoever in the future, instead of "Great Eastern Railway" or "Great Anglian Railway".

Greater Anglia name

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