She had found my web-site by searching on the Internet for information about the GCR, and it just so happens that I have a page devoted to a trip that I made to a preserved railway line (operated by volunteers for tourists and railway enthusiasts) which is called the "Great Central Railway" even though it only covers a very short distance of the former Sheffield to London main-line of that company. Click here if you'd like to visit that page.

The ancestral journey in question had taken place during the summer of 1903, and although I only have access to a handful of old timetables, by one of those amazing coincidences, I happen to own a reprint of the GCR timetable for:

So, as I say, life is full of surprises!* (see below)

Anyway, we exchanged e-mails for a while, and learned a few things from each other (which is always nice when it happens). One of the things that I learned was that there were many people making more or less the same journey as her ancestors did, at more or less the same time. The GCR had obviously tapped into a popular market.

What made the GCR so successful was the fact that they operated ships from Grimsby (a port on the East Coast of England) to some important ports in Northern Europe, and also operated trains from Grimsby to Manchester and on to Liverpool, which was one of the main ports from which ships sailed to North America.

And more importantly (for the European Emigrant) a link by ship to the East Coast of England with connections on the GCR directly to Liverpool where they would then journey on to the US.

As operators of both ships and trains, they also offered combined tickets, so that people from, say, Hamburg, could visit the company's agent, and buy one ticket which would see them all the way to Liverpool.

To assist those of you who may be researching in this area, I have collected together the significant pages from the timetable book, and reproduced them on this page and another page linked to it for you to read at your leisure. (Don't worry that the type is too small in the pictures on this page - just click on these pictures, and you'll download a reproduction at actual size, which you'll hopefully have no trouble reading at all.) Having perused one of those full-size images, just hit the "back" button on your browser to return to this page. (Of course, since these are full-size images, they will take some time to download - and also, it's best if you're running your browser at 800x600, when the images are just about the same width as the screen.) If you want to print the pages out, it may be best to set your printer to "landscape" mode because of the image width.

Links to other web-sites you may find helpful are on the third page I have created about this. Click here to see them.

Background information about the GCR...

Public passenger railways were a British invention, dating from the early 1800's. Many separate strands came together in England and Wales at that time, and the mood was right for railways to become successful. The first proper main-line railway was the Liverpool and Manchester, which was opened to the public in 1830, though some say that the honour of being regarded as the first public railway should really go to the Stockton and Darlington, which offered passenger services in 1825. (In fact people first travelled on a locomotive-hauled railway in South Wales in 1804 - and you can read about this by clicking here - to visit another of my pages!)

By 1840, railways had become established, and there followed an explosion of railway building. The final years of the 1840's in Britain saw an astonishing number of schemes during the period known as the "Railway Mania". Most of the current network of railways in Britain was created at that time. At first, railway companies worked in competition with each other. As time passed, laws were enacted which made the railways co-operate. Nevertheless, it wasn't until 1923 that the hundreds of railway companies were amalgamated into four large concerns. In 1948, these were combined into British Railways, a nationalised enterprise. Since 1995, train services have increasingly been operated by private companies once more, though the rail network is still managed as a whole by one company called Railtrack.

The Great Central Railway originated in an 1813 scheme to link Manchester with Sheffield. Although as planned, that scheme never came to fruition, a railway was built in the early 1840's linking these two cities. Over time, this railway grew into the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, which eventually operated in an area stretching roughly east-west from Liverpool to the Lincolnshire coast. The MS&LR had an ambitious management, and they embarked on a scheme to reach London, and renamed the company the "Great Central" as a result. The GCR terminus in London, Marylebone, was the last of the main-line terminals to be built there, opening in 1899. The extension to London proved costly for the GCR; On paper the GCR should have been a profitable company, but the costs of construction of this branch, as well as other schemes, meant that their shareholders went without dividends.

When during the 1960's it became an economic necessity to close unprofitable railway lines, the former GCR line to London was one of those which went. Some of it survives at the southern end, where a commuter service continues to operate between Marylebone and Aylesbury. Even the original east-west main line from Manchester to Lincolnshire is no longer complete, because the central part of the section between Manchester and Sheffield was declared "surplus to requirements" and closed in the 1980's. Part of the London line has since been reopened as a preserved line, as noted above.

If you're interested in railway history, you might like to click here to see what I've written about the history of railways in the Basingstoke area.

There's more information on the second page - click here to see it

A note about copyright: It's my understanding that because the material presented here dates from 1903, it is out of copyright - certainly, as the timetable I have is a facsimile reprint, it seems I'm not the only person to think so..

*(see above)... but as I've said, I don't have many resources of this nature, so if you e-mail me on the off-chance that I might know something about such-and-such a railway at such-and-such a date, then be prepared for me to say no, I don't. Specifically, I can tell you now that I am not in a position to provide any information at all about Scottish railways or shipping services, nor do I have detailed information about the GCR for any year apart from 1903.

The cover of the
July to September 1903
GCR timetable

It may help you to know that in 1903
British currency was:

12 pennies (symbol "d") = 1 shilling
20 shillings ("s") = 1 pound ("£")

and the exchange rate was
£1 = $4 US.