Great Bentley railway station is on the

Sunshine Coast Line The Sunshine Coast Line is the current marketing name of what originally was the Tendring Hundred Railway Line, a branch off the Great Eastern Main Line in the East of England. It links to the seaside resorts of and, via a branch, . The line ...

, a branch of the

Great Eastern Main Line The Great Eastern Main Line (GEML, sometimes referred to as the East Anglia Main Line) is a major railway line on the British railway system which connects Liverpool Street station in central London with destinations in east London and t ...

, in the

East of England The East of England is one of the nine official regions of England. This region was created in 1994 and was adopted for statistics purposes from 1999. It includes the ceremonial counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire ...

, serving the village of

Great Bentley Great Bentley is a village, civil parish and electoral ward in the Tendring district of north Essex, England, located seven miles east of Colchester. The parish includes the hamlets of Aingers Green and South Heath. It is home to the second larg ...

as well as the nearby settlements of

Brightlingsea Brightlingsea is a coastal town and an electoral ward in the Tendring district of Essex, England. It is situated between Colchester and Clacton-on-Sea, at the mouth of the River Colne, on Brightlingsea Creek. At the 2011 Census, it had a popu ...

Frating Frating is a village and small civil parish of the Tendring district of Essex, England. It is about east of Colchester and northwest of Clacton-on-Sea. The parish includes the settlements of Frating Green and Hockley. The parish church (dedica ...

Thorrington Thorrington is a village and civil parish in the Tendring district of Essex, England. It lies east of Wivenhoe and north of Brightlingsea. The striking medieval flint church is dedicated to Mary Magdalene, and the patrons of the church are St J ...

and

St Osyth St Osyth is an English village and civil parish in the Tendring District of north-east Essex, about west of Clacton-on-Sea and south-east of Colchester. It lies on the B1027, Colchester–Clacton road. The village is named after Osgyth, a 7t ...

. It is down the line from

London Liverpool Street Liverpool Street station, also known as London Liverpool Street, is a central London railway terminus and connected London Underground station in the north-eastern corner of the City of London, in the ward of Bishopsgate Without. It is the t ...

and is situated between Alresford to the west and to the east. Its three-letter station code is GRB. The station was opened by the Tendring Hundred Railway, a subsidiary of the

Great Eastern Railway The Great Eastern Railway (GER) was a pre-grouping British railway company, whose main line linked London Liverpool Street to Norwich and which had other lines through East Anglia. The company was grouped into the London and North Eastern R ...

, in 1866 with the name Bentley Green. It was renamed Great Bentley in 1877. It is currently managed by Greater Anglia, which also operates all trains serving the station.

History

Great Bentley station geograph-3890553-by-Ben-Brooksbank

In 1859 the Tendring Hundred Railway was formed to extend the branch line from

Hythe Hythe, from Anglo-Saxon ''hȳð'', may refer to a landing-place, port or haven, either as an element in a toponym, such as Rotherhithe in London, or to: Places Australia * Hythe, Tasmania Canada *Hythe, Alberta, a village in Canada England * T ...

to , which opened on 8 May 1863 for both passenger and goods services from . By the time the Wivenhoe extension opened, the line was operated by the

(GER) which bought the line from the Tendring Hunded Railway in 1883. The line was then extended to on 8 January 1866. Bentley Green station opened on the same day. It adopted its current name of Great Bentley in 1877. Initially the station was served by a single track but the line was doubled between Great Bentley and by the GER in 1891. The Wivenhoe to Great Bentley section was doubled in 1898. Operation of the station passed to the

London and North Eastern Railway The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) was the second largest (after LMS) of the " Big Four" railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921 in Britain. It operated from 1 January 1923 until nationalisation on 1 January 1948. At th ...

in 1923. In 1948 the station became part of the

Eastern Region of British Railways The Eastern Region was a region of British Railways from 1948, whose operating area could be identified from the dark blue signs and colour schemes that adorned its station and other railway buildings. Together with the North Eastern Region ( ...

. The 1955 modernisation plan proposed the

electrification Electrification is the process of powering by electricity and, in many contexts, the introduction of such power by changing over from an earlier power source. The broad meaning of the term, such as in the history of technology, economic histor ...

of the line through Great Bentley and electric services commenced on 13 April 1959. There was once a small goods yard to the east of the station which had cattle pens, coal wharves and an end loading ramp. In later years the main traffic was coal, agricultural fertilisers and sugar beet. The yard was closed in the 1950s.

Network Rail Network Rail Limited is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, which was known as Railtrack plc before 2002) and infrastructure manager of most of the railway network in Great Britain. Network Rail is an "arm's leng ...

replaced the manually-controlled

level crossing A level crossing is an intersection where a railway line crosses a road, Trail, path, or (in rare situations) airport runway, at the same level, as opposed to the railway line crossing over or under using an Overpass#Railway, overpass ...

gates at Great Bentley with barriers in 2008 as part of a £104 million resignalling project between Colchester and Clacton-on-Sea. The former

signal box In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...

was located at the eastern end of the "up" (London-bound) platform and had 25 levers for the signals and points. Great Bentley has two platforms. Platform 1 is used for westbound services towards and

. Platform 2 is for eastbound services towards and . When built, the two platforms were linked with a lattice footbridge. This was removed in the 1950s when the line was being prepared for electrification.

Services

Current timetable

The typical service pattern is:

Historical timetables

The following services called in July 1922 (the last year of operation by the

): *8 up services (Monday-Saturday) *9 down services (Monday-Saturday) *4 up services (Sundays) *3 down services (Sundays) In June 1956 the timetable showed: *17 up services to Colchester (Monday-Saturday) *15 down services to Clacton (Monday-Saturday) During the summer of 1972 the timetable showed: *17 up services to Colchester (Monday-Friday) *18 down services to Clacton (Monday-Friday) Some services worked through to Liverpool Street. On summer Saturdays, 24 down and 21 up trains called.Great Eastern Railway Society Journal 111 page 27 S Jenkins

References

External links

Great Bentley village website
with a picture of two steam locomotives at this station

Live departures from Great Bentley
{{DEFAULTSORT:Great Bentley Railway Station Railway stations in Essex DfT Category E stations Former Great Eastern Railway stations Railway stations in Great Britain opened in 1866 Greater Anglia franchise railway stations 1866 establishments in England Great Bentley