The Ambergate company was leased to the Great Northern Railway in 1855, and they built their own Nottingham station, opened in 1857.

The freight traffic has greatly diminished, but the line is used for long distance passenger trains between Liverpool and Norwich, as well as from Nottingham to Skegness.

c. clv) to build a line linking the manufacturing districts of Lancashire with the collieries of Nottinghamshire, and the port of Boston, Lincolnshire.

A partner in this scheme was the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock and Midland Junction Railway, authorised on the same day.

[6] In 1839 the Midland Counties Railway had opened a line at Nottingham; the station there was at Carrington Street.

[7][8] The through route would rely on running over the Midland Railway from Bulwell to Colwick, a distance of about 7 miles (11 km) crossing Nottingham.

In 1849 Parliament granted an extension of time, and permitted the proposed lines west of Nottingham and east of Grantham to be abandoned.

[5] The company managed to build from Colwick Junction (where it left the Midland Railway's Nottingham to Lincoln line) to a temporary station at Grantham adjacent to the canal basin near Dysart Road.

[3] Notwithstanding its shaky finances, the Ambergate line was an attractive potential acquisition for a larger company.

The Great Northern Railway had offered to purchase it as soon as it was authorised as it would give useful access to Nottinghamshire, but the line's own directors refused, expecting its value to increase.

The directors of the Ambergate company agreed, but the shareholders rejected the offer; this was probably due to the influence of Graham Hutchinson, a director of the GNR: he had foreseen the value of the Ambergate company to the GNR and had acquired a commanding number of shares.

This was a through coach off the 11 a.m. departure from London King's Cross,[note 4] and the train was drawn by a GNR locomotive when it arrived at Nottingham.

The Midland Railway management considered that this was in breach of the injunction, and forced the arriving locomotive into a disused shed at Nottingham, and removed the rails giving access to it.

This failed in Parliament, but the following year a similar bill was passed as the Ambergate Railway (Nottingham Extension and Station) Act 1854 (17 & 18 Vict.

The Ambergate company could build a 2-mile-61-chain (4.45 km) line from Colwick to a station in East Croft near London Road, together with a connection to the Midland Railway there.

Though similarly constructed in red brick, the earlier building had an immensely complex frontage incorporating ample and vigorous stone embellishments such as balustrades, cornices and dripstones.

Ornate gables and parapets were decorated with diaper patterning, the roof was crowned by a truncated spire capped with ornamental railings, and a projecting porte-cochere provided cover for waiting road carriages.

It left Colwick by a triangular junction, and swept round the north of Nottingham through Ilkeston and Derby as far as Burton upon Trent.

It opened in 1875, and consolidated the position of Colwick as an important goods and mineral marshalling yard and depot.

[7][15] By an Act of 28 July 1873 the GNR obtained powers to construct the Sedgebrook and Barkstone Junction line.

)[16] This was built with the main aim of simplifying the movement of coal from Nottinghamshire to Lincolnshire without reversal at Grantham.

However on 10 January 1874 a passenger train from Boston overran signals at that junction, and fouled the path of an up Anglo-Scottish express service.

The following year the Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway was opened, connecting Market Harborough with the Nottingham and Grantham line, at Bottesford and at Saxondale, further west.

In the 1940s a branch from the Woolsthorpe line was made to Harlaxton, south of Denton, reaching further iron workings.

[15] The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway planned a London extension, and this cut through the centre of Nottingham.

[15] After 1948 summer excursion traffic was run between industrial towns like Alfreton and Coalville to the Lincolnshire seaside resorts.

This radical alteration, however, has been made inconspicuous by painting the exposed iron light grey and the concrete faces (where visible between the apertures of the spandrels) dark blue, so that the external appearance has been preserved, and the modification is noticeable only from close at hand.

[28]David Joy, inventor of the steam locomotive valve gear bearing his name, recounted some adventures in the earliest days, when the line was worked by E. B. Wilson and Company under contract to the proprietors.

Saturday afternoon over the line with Underwood (engineer), Gough (secretary), and on the contractor's (G. Wythes) engine (ballast), went off the road, not very fast, but a jolly tumble about.However the first train departed at 9 a.m. with half a dozen second and third class carriages and a number of wagons.

It was only just in time, the next instant our two poor little light Bury engines were one wreck of material in front of the big six-coupled, with a train of twenty crammed carriages behind her.