IN PICTURES: Remembering 'Peterborough East' railway station

For many generations of Peterborians, the city has only ever had one railway station.

The fact is however that our fair city was once home to two separate stations: Peterborough North and Peterborough East.

While ‘Peterborough North’ has morphed into the mainline station we all know today, ‘Peterborough East’ has been consigned to the history books with little in the way of fanfare or fuss.

Opened with great pomp on June 2, 1845, Peterborough East – then known ‘Peterborough GE’ (Great Eastern Railway) was the city’s first railway station.

Strategically sited on the south bank of the Nene, it was initially built as the eastern terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway's Northampton and Peterborough Railway, with services running west to Northampton and Rugby, as well as to the east to March, Wisbech, and Norwich.

With the opening of the Ely to Peterborough Line in From January of 1847 however, the station ceased to be a terminus as it needed to transit far more railway traffic than was originally predicted.

On January 1, 1923 the decision was made to distinguish the Great Eastern Railway station from the city’s neighbouring Great Northern Railway (GNR), which had opened in 1850.

From then on, the ex-GER station was called Peterborough East, and the ex-GNR station became Peterborough North.

Although Peterborough East continued to operate into the 1960s, modernisation meant its days were numbered. The station closed to freight traffic on April 17, 1966 and to passengers on June 6 of the same year.

Today, the area where the station stood is within the ever-growing Fletton Quays development, where a blue plaque on the western wall of Sand Martin House and a street sign announcing ‘East Station Road’ hint at the site’s former use.

While those with fertile imaginations may be able to envisage the old station footprint sited within what is now the large car park outside the government offices, it is the large Victorian rail Engine Shed – which has been tastefully renovated into Peterborough City Council's HQ – that is the most evocative reminder of Peterborough East’s existence. Here, with the help of our friends at Peterborough Images Archive, we roll back the years to remember Peterborough East as it once was.