Newcastle Central Station

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Newcastle Central is one of the great monuments of the early Railway Age. It is also remains an important and busy station, despite the loss of much of its suburban traffic to the Tyne & Wear Metro. The station was designed by the architect John Dobson and built at the joint expense of the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway (N&C) and George Hudson’s Newcastle & Darlington Junction and Newcastle & Berwick Railways. It replaced three earlier stations. The Newcastle & Carlisle was an early line, opening in stages between 1835 and 1839 and served by a temporary Forth terminus near the west end of Central Station. The Newcastle & Berwick arrived via the tracks of the former Newcastle & North Shields Railway, which had opened in 1839 to a temporary station at Carliol Square.

The Newcastle & Darlington Junction was completed in June 1844 to a rather grand terminus in Gateshead, designed by Hudson’s friend George Townsend Andrews; it was then extended across the river Tyne on Robert Stephenson’s High Level Bridge to reach Central Station. By the time the station opened, on 29 August 1850, Hudson’s two lines had merged to become the York, Newcastle & Berwick Railway (YNB). In August 1854 this merged with two other major railways in the region and changed its name to the North Eastern Railway (NER). 

In July 1862 the N&C relinquished its independence and became part of the NER. With the whole station in one ownership, the NER was able to reorganise its use and increase the number of platforms without enlarging the building. Eventually, however, network and traffic growth made a major enlargement essential, and this was carried out during 1888-94. Further modest extensions were made in connection with the building of another Tyne bridge, the King Edward (KEB), opened in 1906. The electrification of the East Coast Main Line was the catalyst for further change, with British Rail building an additional island platform, brought into use during 1989-90.  

The interior of John Dobson's pioneering arched trainshed, looking west. Originally, the left and middle spans were occupied largely by carriage sidings, which meant there was plenty of space to accommodate additional platforms in the eighteen-seventies. The bay platforms for the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway's trains were over on the right.

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© W. Fawcett, 2011