The Great Northern Railway - King's Cross Station

Arthur H. Beavan continued his survey of railway termini in Imperial London, published in 1901, with this look at King's Cross Station:

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The Great Northern has but a small mileage, a little over 800, but it is a famous and important line.

It covers the counties of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, and by utilizing portions of the North-Eastern and North British systems, reaches Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

This is known as the East Coast route to Scotland, on which the far-famed "races to the North" are run in competition with the London and North-Western Railway on the West Coast route; races that excited so much interest in 1888 and also in 1895, when on August 22nd, the London and North-Western record run from Euston to Aberdeen - 540 miles - was made in eight hours, thirty-two minutes!

King's Cross, the Great Northern terminus, is one of London's ugly stations; there is not the slightest attempt at a facade, or ornamentation of any kind; two huge brick arches, with clock-tower in the centre, lead to a couple of glass and iron sheds, each of them 800 feet long and 105 feet wide, as plain and severely utilitarian as rat-traps, which they resemble.

The management at King's Cross is excellent.

All the main-line trains start from, and arrive at, the big station; but there are wings exclusively for the suburban and metropolitan traffic; and by means of some enormously costly tunnels, the line runs direct to Moorgate Street, and, via Farringdon Road, connects with the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

Remarkably fine and powerful are the locomotives on the Great Northern Railway, and if there be any picturesqueness in railway-travelling it is to be seen at King's Cross as the huge green engine grandly rolls away, taking her thirteen stately corridor coaches on their flight to Scotland.

At their Doncaster works, the Company has built what is claimed to be the biggest engine in the United Kingdom.

It has ten wheels, and weighs one hundred tons; its length, with the tender, is fifty-seven feet, and it can speed from fifty to sixty-five miles an hour easily.

Next: Locomotive London in 1900: The South-Eastern and London, Chatham and Dover Companies