The line was opened in 1899 and built by the Great Central Railway running from Sheffield in the North of England, southwards through Nottingham and Leicester to Marylebone in London.

It was built by the railway entrepreneur Edward Watkin with the aim to run as a fast trunk route from the North and the East Midlands to London and the south of England.

Although initially planned for long-distance passenger services, in practice the line's most important function became to carry goods traffic, notably coal.

Instead it was intended to link the MS&LR's system stretching across northern England directly to London at as high a speed as possible and with a minimum of stops and connections: thus much of its route ran through sparsely populated countryside.

He grew tired of handing over potentially lucrative London-bound traffic to rivals, and, after several unsuccessful attempts in the 1870s to co-build a line to London with other companies, decided that the MS&LR needed to create its own route to the capital.

[2] Watkin was an ambitious visionary; as well as running an independent trunk route into London, where he was chairman of the Metropolitan Railway, he was also involved in a project to dig a channel tunnel under the English Channel to connect with the rail network of France,[3] a scheme vetoed several times by the British Parliament for fear of military invasion by France;[4] however, this project was effectively moribund by the time work on the GCML commenced, and historians who have examined the available primary sources have found no contemporaneous statement by Watkin that he envisaged through workings over the lines he controlled from Manchester to France.

[14] Prior to the construction of the London Extension proper, the MS&LR had extended its reach southwards from its main trans-Pennine axis.

The primary purpose of the Derbyshire Lines was to give the MS&LR access to the collieries of Nottinghamshire, but also served as the first phase in the company's plan to construct an independent route to London.

This gave the MS&LR a more convenient route to send both freight and passenger traffic (the latter by through-coaches and ticketing agreements with the GNR) to London from its main line.

[23] Three special corridor trains, forming part of the new rolling stock constructed for the new line, were run from Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham to the terminus at Marylebone for the inaugural ceremony.

Shortly before the opening of the new line, the MS&LR changed its name to the grander-sounding "Great Central Railway" (GCR) to reflect its new-found national ambitions.

[25] At the height of fast, long-distance passenger steam trains in the 1930s, there were six expresses a day from Marylebone to Sheffield, calling at Leicester and Nottingham, and onto Manchester.

[26] Freight traffic grew healthily and became the lifeblood of the line, the staples being coal, iron ore, steel, and fish and banana trains.

The relatively sparse service pattern on the GCML and the line's high engineering standards with near-continuous but gentle rising and falling gradients, made it possible to run these trains at much higher speeds than was normal.

Coal trains, consisting of mineral wagons not equipped with brakes that could be controlled by the driver, usually ran at no more than 25 mph (40 km/h) and had to descend steep gradients at little more than walking pace.

In January 1960, express passenger services from London to Sheffield and Manchester were discontinued, leaving only three "semi-fast" London-Nottingham trains per day.

These figures were presented to monthly management meetings until the 1950s, when they were suppressed as "unnecessary", but one suspects really "inconvenient" for those proposing Beeching type policies of unnecessarily severe contraction of services [...] This railway is of course the Great Central [...].

[29]The trackbed of the 40-mile (64 km) stretch of main line between Calvert and Rugby, closed in 1966, is still intact except for missing viaducts at Brackley and Willoughby.

A short extension of Chiltern passenger services to a new Aylesbury Vale Parkway station on the Aylesbury-Bicester main road opened on 14 December 2008.

In November 2011 HM Government allocated funding for reopening of the section between Bicester Town and Bletchley (via Claydon Junction), and between Aylesbury Vale Parkway and Claydon Junction, as part of the East West Rail scheme,[32] which might have seen passenger services operating between Reading and Milton Keynes Central (via Oxford) and between London Marylebone and Milton Keynes (via Aylesbury).

[35] The site, dating from 1977 and now one of the largest in the country, stretches to 106 hectares (260 acres) and partly reuses the clay pits dug out by Calvert Brickworks which closed in 1991.

Restoration work on the line between Loughborough Central and the northern outskirts of Leicester commenced and, by 1973, Steam train services were operated under the supervision of a British Railways Inspector.

The GCML crossed above this on a bridge, and NET uses the same alignment to provide a tram stop at the station before transitioning back to the city streets.

Daily steel trains run from Sheffield to Deepcar where they feed the nearby Stocksbridge Steelworks[39][40] owned by Tata Group.

[41] In March 2010 the government announced plans for a future high-speed railway between London and Birmingham that would reuse about 12 miles of the GCR route.

Chiltern Railways had a long-term plan to reopen the Great Central Main Line north of Aylesbury as far as Rugby[30] and onward at a later stage to Leicester.

[43] In January 2019, advocacy group the Campaign for Better Transport released a report in which they listed the line between Aylesbury and Rugby (and between Marylebone and Leicester) as Priority 2 for reopening.

[45] In 2002 the Labour MP for Luton North, Kelvin Hopkins, proposed the re-opening of the GCR as Central Railway, a freight line for a direct container transport connection between northern England and the rest of Europe.

[47] In August 2017, a voluntary lobby group (the English Regional Transport Association) proposed that the line between Calvert and Rugby be reopened using the European standard loading gauge.

[48] A petition online by ERTA has proposed the line should be reopened all the way to Manchester as it would increase capacity on the network with a loop at Buckingham and new stations at Daventry and Brackley with a link to the East West Rail at Claydon.