Description:
The line ran northwards from Victoria Station; the Great Central tunnelled under existing properties and high ground on Mansfield Road. (The tunnel is still in good condition today and runs as far as the former site of Carrington station. It is now blocked off there with a wall of bricks and a manhole to the surface). Carrington Tunnel ran trough Sherwood Rise from Carrington Station which was located roughly at the point where Sherwood Rise met Gregory Boulevard and Mansfield Road). From Carrington station, the line once more had to run underground to traverse Sherwood Rise. This tunnel too is truncated at the Carrington site in the same way as before, the two walls having been built exactly at the Carrington tunnel portals, now buried tens of feet underground. It emerged again in sandstone cutting walls at New Basford station, now the site of a small infill housing development). It was built 1894-1898 as part of the new Great Central Railway, which ran from London Marylebone through Aylesbury, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield, linking up to the old Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway. The first coal trains ran between London and Sheffield in 1898, and passenger travel followed in March 1899. The railway had changed its name to The Great Central Railway, and now the network ran from London in the south through the Midlands to the older network in the North between Lincoln, Grimsby, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Wrexham. In 1923, the GCR was grouped with the GER, GNR, NER, NBR and others to form the London North Eastern Railway, in 1948 British Railways was formed. The line closed in the 1960's. Carrington cutting has now been filled in and redeveloped.