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The Midland Main Line is a major railway in England from London's St. Pancras station to Sheffield, via Luton and Bedford in the East of England, and Kettering, Leicester, Loughborough, East Midlands Parkway, Derby/Nottingham and Chesterfield in the East Midlands. Since the closure of the rival Great Central Main Line in the 1960s, the Midland has been the only direct main-line rail link between London and the East Midlands and parts of South Yorkshire. In January 2009 a new station, East Midlands Parkway, was opened between Loughborough and Trent Junction, as a park-and-ride station for suburban residents of East Midlands cities and to serve nearby East Midlands Airport. Express passenger services on the line are operated by East Midlands Trains. The section between St Pancras and Bedford is electrified and forms the northern half of Thameslink (mainly operated by Thameslink and Great Northern), with a fast service to Brighton and other suburban services. A northern part of the route, between Derby and Sheffield, also forms part of the Cross Country Route to Bristol and in summer, South West tourist resorts, operated by CrossCountry. Tracks from Nottingham to Leeds via Barnsley and Sheffield are shared with ''Northern''. TransPennine Express operate through Sheffield. East Midlands Local also operates regional and local services using parts of the line. Historically the line had an extension through Leeds in the near North East to Carlisle, and by agreement with other line developers ran to Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland. The East and West Coast Main Lines' faster and more direct services to Scotland caused these services to be lost. Later, overhead electrification of the West Coast Main Line and the Beeching cuts saw the marginally longer London-Manchester service via Sheffield ceasing. A straight railway from Derby to Manchester was thwarted in 1863 by the builders of the Buxton Line who sought to monopolise on the West Coast Main Line. The line retains connections to the Peak District via the Hope Valley Line. ==History== The Midland Main Line was built in stages between the 1830s and the 1870s, originating in three lines which met at the Tri Junct Station in Derby, which became the Midland Railway. First to arrive was the line built by the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway from Hampton-in-Arden, Warwickshire to Derby, which opened on 12 August 1839. This route presents the Cross-Country Route through Birmingham to Bristol. Derby was supplemented on 1 July 1840 by the North Midland Railway to Leeds Hunslet Lane ''via'' Chesterfield, Rotherham Masborough, Swinton and Normanton. This avoided Sheffield, Barnsley, and Wakefield to reduce gradients. On the same day the Midland Counties Railway, which also already ran from Nottingham to Leicester, was extended to a temporary station on the northern outskirts of Rugby, Warwickshire. A few months later, the Rugby viaduct was finished so as to reach the London and Birmingham Railway's Rugby station. This cut off the existing Birmingham route ''via'' Hampton-in-Arden. When these three companies merged to form the Midland Railway on 10 May 1844, the Midland did not have its own route to London, and relied upon a junction at Rugby with the London and Birmingham's line (which became part of the London and North Western Railway on 1 January 1846) to London Euston for access to the capital. ;Own Southern Section By the 1850s the junction at Rugby had become severely congested so the Midland Railway constructed a direct route from Leicester to ''via'' Bedford.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title= A Midland Railway chronology>Incorporation and expansion )〕 giving access to London via the Great Northern Railway from Hitchin. The line avoids Northampton, instead going ''via'' Kettering and Wellingborough in the east of Northamptonshire. This line met with similar problems at Hitchin as the former alignment had at Rugby, so in 1868 a line was opened from Bedford ''via'' Luton to ,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title= A Midland Railway chronology>London extension )〕 which became known as the ''Bedpan line'' and is now part of Thameslink extending to Brighton. ;Northernmost Sections The final stretch of what is considered to be the modern Midland Main Line was a relatively short Sheffield by-pass which was opened in 1870. The mid-1870s saw the Midland line extended northwards through the Yorkshire Dales and Eden Valley on what is now solely called the Settle-Carlisle Railway, considered an independent route and not part of the present-day Midland Main Line, although included in its diagram shown to the top right. Before the line closures of the Beeching era, the lines to Buxton and ''via'' Millers Dale during most years presented an alternate (and competing) main line from London to Manchester, carrying named expresses such as ''The Palatine''. Express trains to Leeds and Scotland such as the ''Thames-Clyde Express'' mainly used the Midland's corollary Erewash Valley Line, returned to it then used the Settle and Carlisle Line. Expresses to Edinburgh Waverley, such as ''The Waverley'' travelled through Corby and Nottingham. Partly to appease the concerns and opposition of landowners along the route, in places some of it was built to avoid large estates and rural towns, and to reduce construction costs the railways followed natural contours, resulting in many curves and bends. This has also resulted in the MML passing through some relatively hilly areas, such as Sharnbrook (where there is a 1 in 119 gradient from the south taking the line to above sea level). This has left a legacy of lower maximum speeds on the line compared with other main lines. The response to a similar situation on the West Coast Main Line has been the adoption of tilting trains, but there has been no proposal for such a solution on the Midland line. Most Leicester-Nottingham local passenger trains were taken over by diesel units from 14 April 1958, taking about 51 minutes between the two cities.〔Railway Magazine June 1958 p. 432〕 In 1977 the Parliamentary Select Committee on Nationalised Industries recommended considering electrification of more of Britain's rail network, and by 1979 BR presented a range of options that included electrifying the Midland Main Line from London to Yorkshire by 2000. By 1983 the line had been electrified from Moorgate to Bedford, but proposals to continue electrification to Nottingham and Sheffield have not been implemented. The introduction of the High Speed Train (HST) in May 1983 following the Leicester area resignalling brought about an increase of the ruling line speed on the fast lines from to . Between 2001 and 2003 the line between Derby and Sheffield was upgraded from to as part of Operation Princess, the Virgin-funded CrossCountry route upgrade. In January 2009 a new station, East Midlands Parkway, was opened between Loughborough and Trent Junction, to act as a park-and-ride station for suburban travellers from East Midlands cities and to serve nearby East Midlands Airport.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=East Midlands Parkway - Our greenest station to open on 26 January )〕 Most recently running has been introduced on extended stretches. Improved signalling, increased number of tracks and the revival of proposals to extend electrification from Bedford to Sheffield are underway. Much of this £70 million upgrade, including some line speed increases, came online on 9 December 2013〔http://www.railnews.co.uk/news/2013/12/09-midland-main-line-celebrates-at.html〕 (see below). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Midland Main Line」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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