Manningtree railway station is on 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 ...

(GEML) 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 town of

Manningtree Manningtree is a town and civil parish in the Tendring district of Essex, England, which lies on the River Stour. It is part of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Natural Beauty. Smallest town claim Manningtree has traditionally claimed to b ...

, Essex. 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 to the west and to the east. The three-letter station code is MNG. It is also the western terminus of the Mayflower Line, a branch line to . The following station on the branch is . The station is currently operated by Greater Anglia, who also operate all trains serving it, as part of the

East Anglia franchise The East Anglia franchise is a railway franchise for passenger trains on the Great Eastern Main Line and West Anglia Main Lines in England. It commenced operating in April 2004 when the Anglia and Great Eastern franchises, together with the W ...

History

The station was opened by the

Eastern Union Railway The Eastern Union Railway (EUR) was an English railway company, at first built from Colchester to Ipswich; it opened in 1846. It was proposed when the earlier Eastern Counties Railway failed to make its promised line from Colchester to Norwich. T ...

in 1846 but rebuilt by 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 1899–1901; this building survives. It was designed by

W. N. Ashbee William Neville Ashbee (1852 – 30 April 1919) was an English railway architect notable for railway station, stations on the Great Eastern Railway, including the London terminus at Liverpool Street Station. Career The son of John Ashbee, w ...

Description

Immediately east of the station there is a triangle of junctions, known as the Manningtree South, North and East junctions and originally each double-track junction was controlled by an individual

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'' ...

. In 1926 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 ...

installed a new power box at Manningtree South which controlled all three junctions. Today, the north to east curve connecting Ipswich with is a single track, having been reduced from double-track. All three sides of the triangle are electrified. A second peculiar feature just east of the station is a combination of a road underpass and a

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 ...

. The underpass has limited height and the parallel level crossing is needed to permit higher vehicles to cross the railway. Platform 1 is a

bay platform In the United Kingdom and in Australia, a bay platform is a dead-end railway platform at a railway station that has through lines. It is normal for bay platforms to be shorter than their associated through platforms. Overview Bay and islan ...

accessible only from the Mayflower Line. It has an operational length for five-coach trains. Platform 2 (London-bound) and platform 3 (country-bound) each have an operational length for twelve-coach trains. There is a fourth platform on the outer side of the "down" (country-bound) platform which is electrified, but its use would be confined to emergency situations. It can only be used to access the main line to or from Ipswich . The station has (on the London-bound platform) a manned booking office and a self-service ticket machine. There is a side-gate west of the station building for use outside of office hours and a self-service ticket machine is also available here. There is a station buffet at the eastern end of the building. The installation of lifts started in December 2015 and they are due to be in operation in Autumn 2016.

Accidents

*On 20 August 1898, five people were slightly injured in a collision between a train and two carriages it was moving to attach to at Manningtree. The stationary carriages contained around 50 passengers and had just been detached from a main line train; they were due to be attached to the branch line train for Harwich Town but it reversed back to them at too great a speed and shunted into them with sufficient force to propel them backward by five or six yards. A

Board of Trade The Board of Trade is a British government body concerned with commerce and industry, currently within the Department for International Trade. Its full title is The Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed for the consideration of ...

investigation reported the driver misjudged the position of the carriages and the speed of his train, and the shunter failed to timely signal to the driver that he was too close to the coaches and moving too fast.

Services

The following services typically called at Manningtree in 2016: Manningtree - Greater Anglia 90003 and 321360

References

External links

Manningtree Rail Users Association
{{Authority control Railway stations in Essex DfT Category C2 stations Former Great Eastern Railway stations Greater Anglia franchise railway stations William Neville Ashbee railway stations Railway stations in Great Britain opened in 1846 Tendring