Trains at: Colchester, GEML, 26/09/2020

An excellent afternoon spent at Colchester on the Great Eastern Mainline where we see plenty of services from Greater Anglia and freight from GBRF and Freightliner.

Even though this was filmed on a weekend that engineering works were taking place between Ipswich and Norwich there was still plenty of variety to be seen, although the weather wasn't overly wonderful throughout my stay here.

Colchester was opened in 1843 by the Eastern Counties Railway, and when it was first opened it was simply known as Colchester, although the locals knew it was Colchester North in order to distinguish it from Colchester Town Railway Station. Unlike most major railway stations Colchester is actually a fair distance away from the town centre, it has connections with the local bus service along with shuttle train services to Colchester Town which is closer to the town centre, hence the name. For the next three years the station was the terminus of the Great Eastern Mainline until the Eastern Union Railway opened the line to Ipswich once local businesses started to generate some interest.

When the station was built it obviously didn't have the passenger numbers that they have today and as such was only built as a simple station with a couple of platforms and was built on a relatively sharp curve as we can all see today anyway, but with this came a rather large problem, trains would run to Clacton-on-Sea during the summer months which would naturally bring with it a large number of people, and the passenger count did indeed grow exponentially. So eventually the line was modernised in 1962 and given the format that we all know today. With this then gave Colchester the longest physical platform in the country with a length of 620m or 2034ft, not to be confused with the record that Gloucester has as that holds the record for the longest unbroken platform at 1977ft.

My next station is going to be Kettering on the Midland Mainline which is a cracking station.

If you have any stations or trackside locations you would like to see me go to then please do let me know and I will see what I can do for you.

If you would like to help support the channel you can do so by donating to the PayPal link found down below, any and all funds will go straight back into the channel to help better the content by allowing me to go further afield for you.

https://paypal.me/jazzman92?locale.x=...

You can now find me on Facebook through the group Tornado922, there you will find regular updates, videos and photos from all of my goings on throughout 2020.

You can now find me on Instagram through the name tornado922