How much freight was there on the GCML prior to closure?

[Jorge Da Silva]

How much freight was there using the Great Central and did it get diverted elsewhere?

 

[L+Y]

Not an answer but an additional question- I'd be very interested to hear about any non-MOD traffic on the surviving Rugby-Nottingham section after 1966.

 

[Magdalia]

How much freight was there using the Great Central and did it get diverted elsewhere?

A lot and yes.

In "Big Four" days a key feature was that the LNER and the GWR had a shared boundary between Woodford Halse and Banbury. This allowed them to exchange long distance freight without any LMS involvement. This pattern survived for quite a while with the ER and GWR after Nationalisation. The rationale for this was lost with the regional reorganisation of the LMR and ER in the Nottingham and Sheffield areas in 1958.

As with most railways coal was the most important traffic, and, after the second world war, the LNER pioneered efficient movement of coal with the "runners", a frequent service between Annesley and Woodford Halse that enabled traincrew to do a round trip in a single shift. Coal would be moved to Annesley from the local collieries, then marshalled into trains to go to Woodford for transit to the GWR. These ran until summer 1965 and in the final years were 9F hauled. They are the grandparent of the MGR concept, the 7* partially fitted coal trains of the early 1960s coming in between.

Steel traffic between Scunthorpe, the Sheffield area and South Wales was also important. This was the first important freight flow to be moved off the Great Central in 1963. When the steel traffic first moved to the Midland's NE/SW route the trains changed locos at Washwood Heath using ER pairs of Brush Type 2s and WR "Westerns", but Brush Type 4s were running through by 1965.

There were various fast fitted freights between the Manchester area and Dringhouses near York to Woodford Halse, the trains from/to Dringhouses usually being V2s.

And no survey of freight on the Great Central is complete without fish, with 2 trains each from Hull and Grimsby. The first of each of these ran through to Marston sidings on the WR near Swindon, and after exchanging traffic, the Grimsby train continued to Whitland and the Hull train to Plymouth. These finished in early 1965 with most of the fish traffic switching to road haulage. The Grimsby-Whitland fish is renowned for a short period in the early 1960s when an Immingham Britannia hauled the train all the way to Banbury. In its final years the Hull-Plymouth fish had a Dairycoates EE Type 3 to Leicester Central.

 

[RT4038]

How much freight was there using the Great Central and did it get diverted elsewhere?

The last booked through freight ran on 11th June 1965. So between then and 3rd September 1966 only the Hotchley Hill gypsum and Leicester Abbey Lane fuel tanks local freight, both of which were reached by newly constructed spurs from other lines after closure.

Not an answer but an additional question- I'd be very interested to hear about any non-MOD traffic on the surviving Rugby-Nottingham section after 1966.

I think there were no freights on the Leicester-Rugby section after 11 June 1965, and only the above local shunts elsewhere.