Lowestoft railway station (formerly Lowestoft Central) serves the town of Lowestoft, Suffolk. It is the eastern terminus of the East Suffolk Line from and is one of two eastern termini of the Wherry Lines from (the other being ). Lowestoft is down the line from Norwich and measured from Ipswich; it is the easternmost station on the National Rail network in the United Kingdom.
The station is currently managed by Greater Anglia, which also operates all of the trains that call. Services are typically formed of Class 755 FLIRT trains.
According to Office of Rail Regulation usage figures for 2010/11, Lowestoft was the fourth-busiest station in Suffolk, after Ipswich, and . Until the late 1960s, the station was served more frequently, with regular express trains for holidaymakers in the summer to and from London Liverpool Street and local services to Great Yarmouth. As part of Greater Anglia’s latest franchising agreement in 2016, direct services between Lowestoft and London will return; however, there are currently "no indications of when services may be introduced".
History Early days On 30 June 1845, the Lowestoft Railway and Harbour Company was incorporated to build a harbour and dock railway in Lowestoft. The scheme, which was promoted by Samuel Morton Peto, included a line from Lowestoft to the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway with which it formed a junction near Reedham. On 3 July 1846, the Norfolk Railway obtained a lease to construct the line, which it did by May 1847. The line was opened to goods on 3 May and to passengers on 1 July 1847. A second route was opened on 1 June 1859 with the completion of the Lowestoft and Beccles Railway which entered the town via a swing bridge over Oulton Broad, where a freight line branched off to the south bank of Lowestoft harbour. The new line connected Lowestoft with London, , and other places more conveniently without having to go via .
Lowestoft station opened on 1 July 1847. At the time of construction, the station was separated from the town on the clifftop by about ½-mile of green fields and farmland, although a new turnpike road (now known as London Road North) linked it to Lowestoft. Development was stimulated by the construction of the harbour later in 1847 and extension of the railway to a new fish market and cattle sheds. Initially, only two platforms were provided, but rebuilding took place in 1855 by Lucas Brothers when a more substantial and well-designed building was provided. The Italianate station is a fine example of their work, which also includes buildings such as the Royal Albert Hall, Liverpool Street station, York station and the Felixstowe Railway. In 1855, the station's roof burnt down and timber for the new roof was brought in from Scandinavia by Peto's North of Europe Steam Navigation Company. The main buildings were arranged in an L-shaped configuration, with the booking, enquiry and parcels offices laid out on the north side bordering Denmark Road, the refreshment rooms were on the east side opening into Station Square and the toilets and bookstall were to the south. The concourse was covered by an overall roof which extended some way over the tracks and platforms to provide a small train shed.
With the arrival of the railway, Lowestoft's population doubled in 16 years to reach 10,000 and by the end of the century it had increased to 36,000. In 1849, Peto constructed the esplanade and the Royal Hotel was opened. The Norfolk Railway was taken over by the Eastern Counties Railway in 1848, which provided a Friday service of cheap trains to London from summer 1859, with Lowestoft coaches being collected at by expresses from Yarmouth.
Growth The Port of Lowestoft expanded rapidly to cover an area of in less than a century, which included over of quay dealing in commodities and nearly of quay dealing with fish traffic. This resulted in track and signal alterations between Lowestoft and Coke Ovens Junction in 1885 which were carried out by the Great Eastern Railway, which had taken over the Eastern Counties Railway in 1862. The two single lines from the junction were turned into double track, and an extra (third) platform was added at the station. Two new signalboxes were provided: one at Coke Ovens and the other on the north side of Lowestoft station. Engine sheds and a turntable were also provided.
The Great Eastern introduced the first direct services to and from London in 1863, with services leaving Bishopsgate railway station at 10.00am and taking 3¼ hours to complete the journey. On 1 June 1872, a new curve between Marsh Junction on the Yarmouth to Beccles Line and Swing Bridge Junction on the Yarmouth side of Haddiscoe High Level railway station enabled direct services between Lowestoft and via . The 1883 timetable shows eight stopping trains each way between Ipswich, Lowestoft and Yarmouth, with two or three services a day from London. A Mondays only service ran from Liverpool Street with stops at Ipswich, and Beccles. The first non-stop express between London and Lowestoft ran in summer 1900 and by 1904 non-stop runs were provided on a regular basis during the summer period. The traditional access to London was however by shuttle train connection out of the Yarmouth services at Beccles or by portions split and worked forward from there. Nine or ten passenger services to Norwich operated on weekdays and four on Sundays in 1905, the frequency increasing to 12 each way on weekdays by 1921.
Holiday traffic to Lowestoft prospered, particularly after 13 July 1898 when the Norfolk and Suffolk Joint Committee opened a new line from and Yarmouth South Town via , and to Lowestoft, where a second station serving the town, named , was opened. The opening of a second station in the town resulted in the main station being renamed Lowestoft Central in 1903. The Great Eastern sought to foster the holiday traffic by providing a bus service to Southwold from 18 July 1904 to January 1913 and also one to Oulton Broad. The increased naval activity brought on by the First World War saw the number of passengers using Lowestoft Central via the Norfolk & Suffolk double from a pre-war average of 25,000 per year to a near-record of 54,506 in 1918. The record was reached in 1919 when 63,859 used the station. In Summer 1924, a long-distance restaurant car express ran from Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield to Lowestoft and Yarmouth, while an all-year round service began operating to and from York with portions for Lowestoft and Yarmouth dividing at Reedham. The journey to York took just over six hours, while Liverpool was reached in seven hours. A restaurant car was added to the York express by the early 1930s and the service remained in the timetable until the mid 1960s, although in its later years a buffet car was used instead. The Holiday Camps Express ran via Lowestoft to serve the holiday camps along the coast from 1934 to 1939 and then after the war until 1958. Another express, The Easterling, was introduced in June 1950 to run non-stop between Liverpool Street and Beccles where a portion would be detached for Lowestoft.
Goods traffic had been constant for many years. The chief materials brought into Lowestoft included coal (from Leicester and Melton Mowbray), bricks (to Lowestoft North), pipes, glass, sheet metal plates, flour, beer, grain and wheel-rims to be exported to the Netherlands. Goods sent out from Lowestoft included canned foods, wood cases and fish to London and Bury St. Edmunds. Between 1899 and 1914, a travelling post office left the station at 2000 each evening, reaching Ipswich at 2340.
In 1914, a sleeper depot was opened on a reclaimed mud bank in Lake Lothing. It grew to cover and had a capacity of 450,000 sleepers as well as a wharf enabling ships to unload directly. Following the closure of Melton Constable Works in 1936, the depot became a centre for the construction of many items such as fenceposts and building parts, which were sent all over the LNER and Eastern Region. The depot, which had its own narrow gauge railway, incorporated a pre-cast sleeper depot which supplied over half of the Eastern Region with two or three special trains leaving it each week. In an average year, about 328,000 sleepers were dispatched with 10,600 tons of chairs and baseplates and many tons of small permanent way accessories. The activity continued until 1964 after which the land was used by Shell for offices, a helipad, supply ship berths and a stores complex. A siding serving Shell was closed later in the 1970s.
Decline As early as the 1930s, the fish traffic began to decline until there were only seasonal specials on the Norfolk & Suffolk in addition to the fish vans on the daily return goods trip. The fall in income from fish traffic was only partially replaced by the development of holiday camps along the coast. In addition, the drop-off in traffic on the line between Yarmouth and Lowestoft via the Haddiscoe curve resulted in its closure in 1934 and lifting in 1939. The service had not been as fast as trains on the Yarmouth-Lowestoft line and by the 1930s it was also facing competition from buses on the A12. Nevertheless, the summer timetable for 1939 still showed seventeen services each way, most of which were all-stoppers, while others were combined with Yarmouth services at Reedham before continuing to Norwich in a journey time of up to one hour and sixteen minutes.
During the early years following nationalisation, services on the Norfolk & Suffolk line were busy on summer Saturdays but less patronised at other times when a single push and pull unit hauled by a GER Class M15 or a GER Class G69 sufficed. Reliance on summer traffic was not enough and when British Railways started making losses from 1952 onwards, attention was turned to pruning the network by closing unremunerative lines. Thus in 1953 when major repairs to Breydon Viaduct were required, it was decided that Lowestoft could be adequately served during the summer season by diverted trains via Norwich Thorpe, and so the ordinary passenger and freight services were withdrawn as from 20 September. A good service nevertheless continued between Yarmouth South Town and Lowestoft, as well as a Saturdays through train from Birmingham. In May 1956, Prince Philip visited Lowestoft to open the new South Pier Pavilion and LNER Thompson Class B1 No. 61399 was used to haul the train from Wickham Market Junction.
On 2 November 1959, passenger services on the Yarmouth-Beccles line ceased, partly due to the expense of maintaining the swing bridges at Beccles and St Olaves, and it was reported that the British Transport Commission wished to re-route the line's traffic via Lowestoft. However, although the Lowestoft-Yarmouth line was upgraded to take express traffic, including the lengthening of the station platforms, the London expresses to Yarmouth were sent via Norwich as from 18 June 1962. The line was subsequently recommended for closure in the Beeching report, together with the East Suffolk line from as far as Lowestoft. At this time, there was a daily pick-up goods service between Yarmouth South Town and Lowestoft but this ceased on 4 November 1967 and the same weekend the line was singled. The Yarmouth-Lowestoft line closed on 4 May 1970 but the East Suffolk line was reprieved by Barbara Castle on 29 June 1966. The closure of the Yarmouth-Lowestoft line and Lowestoft North station resulted in the "Central" being dropped from Lowestoft's name as from 3 May 1971. The late 1960s also saw the platform awnings cut back, although the roof over the main concourse was left intact.