About an hour or so spent at Norwich which is the eastern terminus of the Great Eastern Mainline where we see wall to wall services from Greater Anglia and East Midlands Trains.

The station has a rich a varied history, I wont go through every detail that has happened over the years but I shall still try and keep it as interesting as possible.

The original station was built and opened by the Yarmouth & Norwich Railway in 1843 with the lead engineer of the project being none other than George Stevenson and his son Robert, the line was 20 1/2 miles in length and ran between the two towns, this was the first public railway in Norfolk.

17 days after the first trains were seen running regular passenger services on the line the government at the time issued what was known as a Royal Assent which meant a company had the approval and the funding to create a new stretch of line, this company would be the Norwich & Brandon Railway, the aim of this was to eventually link up Norwich to London. This would be done by linking up with the lines being built by the Eastern Counties Railway creating a line from Newport in Essex to Brandon in Suffolk.

The next real major thing to happen would be the amalgamation of the different companies running stock and lines to form the Great Eastern Railway, they would see total operation of all the lines throughout the Anglia region from their inception in 1862 to their end in 1922.

One of the first things they did would be to open a new line from Norwich to Cromer in 1874. This new line brought with it a few new stations and a new terminus station that no longer exists.

Things stayed roughly the same right up until the Railways Act of 1921 which saw the GER become part of the London & Northeastern Railway (LNER)

When LNER became part of British Rail (Eastern Region) the station (known as Norwich Thorpe) had a new platform added and a modern booking hall, this was done in 1955.

Around that time BR were starting to phase out the steam engines using the network and replacing them with diesels.

Norwich City station was closed due to the beeching cuts and as such Thorpe station was simply renamed Norwich. After that in the 1980s the station was briefly closed to allow for engineering work to take place for the upcoming electrification of the line which at the time only ran up to Ipswich from London, this meant that journey times were quite long because of the fact that the trains would have to change from diesel to electric and so on.

I don't think I'll be coming back here again, not unless something drastic happens as it's just so boring now.

My next station will be Ipswich.

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