Bury St Edmunds railway station

Grade II listed railway station in Suffolk, England

Bury St Edmunds railway station serves the town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England. The station is on the Ipswich–Ely line and all trains calling there are operated by Greater Anglia.

The Ipswich and Bury Railway Company (I&BR) was formed to build a line from Ipswich to Bury St Edmunds. Its Act of 21 July 1845 authorised capital of £400,000 and it shared many shareholders and directors with the Eastern Union Railway (EUR), who were in the process of building their line from Colchester to Ipswich. The companies also shared the same head office location in Brook Street, Ipswich. The proposed line was 26.5 mile (43 km) long, with intermediate stations at Bramford, Claydon, Needham, Stowmarket, Haughley Road, Elmswell and Thurston. The ground breaking ceremony took place in Ipswich on 1 August 1845, where twelve local worthies (including the mayor of Ipswich, engineer Peter Bruff and John Chevallier Cobbold) each filled a wheelbarrow with soil. Building the line was challenging, with problems at Ipswich with tunnel construction and at Stowmarket where the local marsh swallowed up a lot of material with test probes finding the bog was 80 feet deep! On 26 November 1846, the first test train ran to a temporary station at Bury St Edmunds, with stops at most stations on the route with the inevitable lavish celebrations. The official opening followed on 7 December 1846, when a special train ran from Shoreditch (later Bishopsgate railway station) to Bury. The Board of Trade inspection took place on 15 December 1846 and the line opened for traffic on 24 December. The existing station at Bury opened in November 1847. The EUR and I&BR were worked as one from 1 January 1847 and formal amalgamation was obtained by Act of 9 July 1847. The Eastern Union Railway was taken over by the Eastern Counties Railway in 1854. By the 1860s, the railways in East Anglia were in financial trouble and most were leased to the ECR; they wished to amalgamate formally, but could not obtain government agreement for this until 1862, when the Great Eastern Railway was formed by amalgamation. Thus Bury St Edmunds became a GER station in 1862. The line was extended to join the Newmarket to Cambridge line in 1854.

The line from Long Melford opened in 1865 and the line to Thetford opened in 1876. A direct link to Ely was provided in 1880 at Kennett. The Bury Yard signal box was opened in 1888. It was a GER Type 7 design with a Mackenzie and Holland frame.

Following the 1923 grouping, Bury St Edmunds became a LNER station. During World War 2, Bury was an important freight location for the many airbases in East Anglia.

In 1948, Bury St Edmunds became part of British Railways Eastern Region. According to the Official Handbook of Stations the following classes of traffic were being handled at this station in 1956: G (Goods), P (Passenger, Parcels & Miscellaneous), F (Furniture Vans, Carriages, Motor Cars, Portable Engines and Machines on Wheels), L (Livestock), H (Horse Boxes and Prize Cattle Vans) and C (Carriages and Motor Cars by Passenger or Parcels Train); there was a 9 ton crane. Private sidings were operated by British Sugar, Burlingham & Son, J Gough & Son, Ridley Coal & Iron and H A& D Taylor. The Bury St Edmunds to Thetford line closed to passengers on 8 June 1953 and to goods traffic on 27 June 1960. The line to Long Melford closed to passengers on 10 April 1961 and to freight on 19 April 1965. The engine shed closed in 1959. The railway bridge to the east of the station was Grade II listed in 1988.

Designed by Sancton Wood, the station was inaugurated formally in November 1847, eleven months after the opening of the Eastern Union Railway's line from Ipswich. Wood was also the architect of Ipswich and Cambridge railway stations, as well as many stations in Ireland, including that of Heuston Station, Dublin. The most noteworthy feature of the station, which is constructed of red brick with stone dressings, is a pair of towers on either side of the tracks at the eastern end of the layout; these were linked originally by an overall roof, removed in 1893. It was built first as a terminus; the station had four tracks, although in practice only one platform was used before the line was extended to Newmarket in 1854. Today, a wide space separates the two surviving through tracks, which serve platform 1 (for trains towards Cambridge or Peterborough) and platform 2 (for trains towards Ipswich and Harwich International). Early photographs show the station with the overall roof. Later photographs indicate major alterations had taken place, with a westward extension of the platforms; the join is readily apparent in the back walls to the platforms today, with the roof removed, extra rooms at platform level added to the west of the station master's house and alterations to the frontage of that house. Interestingly, the tall decorative upper chimneys are also shown as having been removed down to the basic rectangular stacks and conventional pots installed. The semi elliptical brick arch bridge over Northgate Road, to the east of the station, is a Grade II listed building like the station itself; it has been credited to Frederick Barnes, who was a partner of Sancton Wood and Charles Russell. The two platforms are connected by a subway.

A goods yard was situated to the west of the station, on the down side. A substantial new goods depot was opened in 1953; it was converted later to a roller skating venue.