The North London Railway
Writing in a railway modelling magazine about his efforts to scratchbuild a ‘OO’ gauge NLR 4-4-0T, Iain Rice described the North London Railway as “a total enigma – it went the wrong way, east-west instead of into the city!”
While not entirely true (for it did later get a City terminus of its own) that was because it was originally conceived not as a commuter line, but to link Poplar Docks with the West Coast Main Line, then the London & Birmingham Railway.
Incorporated on August 26 1846, the NLR was thus originally called the East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway Company, before changing to its snappier title in 1853.
Initially, the company’s passenger trains used the London & Blackwall Railway’s terminus at Fenchurch Street, but as traffic increased, the NLR opened its own line southwards from Dalston Junction to a terminus at Broad Street in 1865.
Although the NLR’s own network covered a mere 13 miles, by 1900 it had running powers over nearly 50 miles of other companies’ metals, including the Great Northern Railway to Potter’s Bar. In LMS days, these workings from Broad Street took Fowler ‘Jinty’ 0-6-0Ts – including the now-preserved No. 16576 (47493) – onto the East Coast Main Line.
From 1863, the NLR constructed all its own stock at Bow Works, and in 1909 it had 122 locomotives, 734 carriages and 568 wagons. The Vintage Carriages Trust register lists 15 surviving NLR coaches, of which four are operational; one currently at Beamish (on hire from the Furness Railway Trust), one at the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and two at the Pallot Steam Museum in Jersey.
In an agreement with the London & North Western Railway, that company took over the working of the NLR from January 1 1909, and the NLR was formally absorbed into the LNWR empire from January 1 1922.