I have been recently been reading about the GWR expresses from London Paddington to Birkenhead Woodside which ran out of Paddington starting on the original Great Western Main Line and then running via what is now the Central Line of the London Underground to join the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway, now the Chiltern Main Line to Birmingham, where beyond Birmingham Snow Hill, they ran over the West Midlands Metro to Wolverhampton before diverging to Shrewsbury on a line now served by TfW services to Holyhead, crossing into North Wales to serve Wrexham and then back into England for a curve avoiding Chester General station onto what is now the 3rd rail electrified Mersey Wirral Line, which runs through the 1886 Mersey Railway Tunnel and terminates in the much newer loop line of the 1970s. I’ll ignore the link which now exists from Liverpool Central to the Cheshire Lines Committee main line because no through train from Paddington ever reached the Mersey Railway Tunnel, with them all terminating in the GWR Woodside terminus.
What’s obvious from this description is that none of these lines were named as such at the time when it was A Great Western Main Line, but not THE Great Western Main Line to Bath, Bristol, Penzance etc. Merseyrail was only designated on 3 May 1971 and wasn’t extended over the Birkenhead Joint Railway from Rock Ferry to Chester until 1985-93 The West Midlands Metro didn’t even open until 1999 and it certainly wasn’t a tramway in GWR days! The name Chiltern Main Line was invented by Network SouthEast in 1986 to represent only the southern section of the line, which it came under its business sector.
So my question is, what was the complete line, from Paddington to Birkenhead via Wolverhampton and all the other places mentioned, called when it was a complete main line? Because I can’t find anything calling it anything other than the Chiltern Main Line (or the TfW section as the Wolverhampton-Shrewsbury/Shrewsbury-Wrexham/Wrexham-Chester lines.)
What’s obvious from this description is that none of these lines were named as such at the time when it was A Great Western Main Line, but not THE Great Western Main Line to Bath, Bristol, Penzance etc. Merseyrail was only designated on 3 May 1971 and wasn’t extended over the Birkenhead Joint Railway from Rock Ferry to Chester until 1985-93 The West Midlands Metro didn’t even open until 1999 and it certainly wasn’t a tramway in GWR days! The name Chiltern Main Line was invented by Network SouthEast in 1986 to represent only the southern section of the line, which it came under its business sector.
So my question is, what was the complete line, from Paddington to Birkenhead via Wolverhampton and all the other places mentioned, called when it was a complete main line? Because I can’t find anything calling it anything other than the Chiltern Main Line (or the TfW section as the Wolverhampton-Shrewsbury/Shrewsbury-Wrexham/Wrexham-Chester lines.)