Eastern Counties Railway
[2] A tour of the key towns on the route followed where considerable opposition from landowners, from sections of the press and members of the public was encountered.
[3] Construction of the line began in late March 1837 and progress east of Stratford was relatively easy as the land was largely arable.
West of Stratford the line had to cross the unstable Bow Marshes and after that, the built-up nature of the area meant that the railway had to be built on expensive viaducts.
[4] The two-track railway opened on 20 June 1839 from a temporary terminus at Devonshire Street in Mile End, Middlesex, as far as Romford in Essex.
On opening day, two trains topped and tailed by locomotives proceeded along the line watched by crowds of people.
Guests of the company enjoyed a sumptuous banquet at Romford enlivened by the sound of cannon and the band of the Coldstream Guards.
ECR backers in Norfolk and Suffolk were demanding work start in their area and the company was forced to go to Parliament to increase its capital, although this move was rejected.
[8] In 1843, the ECR directors were approached with a proposal to build a line from Stratford to the River Thames with the intention of sending out agricultural produce by rail with coal forming the bulk of the traffic the other way.
A bill came before Parliament sponsored by the Eastern Counties, Stratford and Thames Junction Railway Company and it was the ECR that built the line through to North Woolwich opening on 14 June 1847.
[10] Following the acquisition of the N&ER the ECR concentrated on building the line towards Newport (Essex) and on 4 July 1844, Parliament passed the Eastern Counties Railway Company (Ely, Brandon and Peterborough Extension) Act 1844 (7 & 8 Vict.
Late in 1845, George Hudson was invited by the ECR shareholders to become chairman and an upswing in the lines finances resulted.
Hudson then proposed various schemes designed to take the ECR towards York and Lincoln joining up with his North Midland Railway at South Milford.
In fact the ECR operated the St Ives to Huntingdon line on behalf of the EAR, but it proved so unprofitable that they threatened to withdraw from the arrangement in October 1849.
[14] By 1849, things were going poorly for ECR chairman George Hudson, and following his non-attendance at the AGM the shareholders, who had received a very small dividend, set up a committee to look into his financial management of the company.
Later the same month the Dereham to Fakenham line, the building of which had been started by the Norfolk Railway, was opened by the ECR on 20 March 1849.
The line was completed in 1851 and initially the GNR, who had leased the Royston and Hitchin Railway in the interim, ran a connecting horse-drawn omnibus service.
A third line between Stratford and Bow Junction was built to help accommodate this traffic and ECR services had running rights into Fenchurch Street via the London and Blackwall Railway extension route.
The final railway opened by the ECR before the incorporation of the GER in 1862 took place on 12 April 1860, when the Leiston branch in East Suffolk was extended to Aldeburgh.
Following the extension of the ECR to Brentwood in 1840, a "railway factory" at Romford (between the current stations of Chadwell Heath and Gidea Park (on the east side of the line) was built being fully operational by 1842.
At this stage, Stratford was a largely rural location with plenty of land being available and in connection with this move the ECR built 300 new houses for the work force.
In order to build the line, the ECR purchased four 0-4-0 ballast locomotives delivered in late 1838 and named Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Middlesex.
Perhaps the best example of this was his Y class 2-4-0 introduced in 1859, which when finished (in Great Eastern days and after Sinclair had departed the company) numbered 110 locomotives.
Although the general design was the same the locomotives were built by a number of different companies including Kitsons, Vulcan and in 1865 (in GER days) the French railway firm Schneider at cie.[67] The ECR sent the first Y class No 327 (an example built by Stephenson) to the 1862 International Exhibition where it caught the eye of the Egyptian government who ordered 11 similar locomotives.
Engineer John Braithwaite deployed the first steam excavating machine used on a UK railway at Brentwood (exact date unknown but working in 1843).
[73] The ECR was the first railway company to use a two-wheel pony truck, in 1859, using the design of American inventor Levi Bissell.
It proved reasonably successful and in fact not long after delivery covered the 126-mile (203 km) route from Bishopsgate to Norwich via Cambridge in a creditable (for the time) 3 hours 35 minutes.
[78] Following the opening of the line to North Woolwich the ECR ordered two ferries called Essex and Kent from Blyth & Co of Barking.
[81] Between 1851 and 1854 the ECR had under the chairmanship of David Waddington negotiated arrangements to work most of the other railways in East Anglia resulting in a network of lines totalling 565 miles (909 km).
These included, continual conflict over the working of other lines, suspicion and distrust of the joint committee, inadequate services to and from London, ongoing litigation and legal costs and a lack of progress on amalgamation.
