• Home
• Community information
• About Peterborough
• Historical Peterborough
• The landscape is formed
• Our first people
• Farmers and potters
• Monuments and mysteries
• Pre-history gives way to the Romans
• The Romans make their mark
• Settlers and saints
• A medieval new town
• From abbey to cathedral, from town to city
• Civil war and a return to peace
• Prosperity and puddles
• A tribute to a rural tradition
• The railway age
• A modern city emerges
• A century of changes

Peterborough City Council would like to use cookies to store information on your computer, to improve our website. To find out more about how we use cookies see our privacy notice. Please press the agree button if you wish to accept cookies from this site.

The railway age

The railway arrived in Peterborough in 1845 with what later became known as the East Station, to link Peterborough with the London and Birmingham Railway. Other lines followed over the next five years and in 1850 the North Station opened, on the site of the present main line station, when the Great Northern Railway line reached the city of London.

From the 1850s to the 1960s Peterborough was a nationally important railway centre with a locomotive depot and engineering works plus some 80 miles of sidings, creating many new jobs and bringing huge growth and prosperity to an already thriving city. By 1901 the railway industry employed 25% of the city's adult male population.

Over 260 new houses were built just north of the city between 1854 and 1866 for the railway workers, in an area that came to be called 'New England'. It is still known by this name today.

The railway encouraged many people to travel further afield - in 1851 day trippers could leave Peterborough at 7.00am on the Great Northern Railway to visit the Great Exhibition in London, paying 5s (25p) for a second class ticket, while in 1875 a cheap excursion ticket from Huntingdon to Peterborough Agricultural Society's Show' cost Is 6d (7p).