Britain's Railway Age of Amalgamation

The story begins in 1828, when the Llanelly Railway and Dock Company was authorized to open a short line and a wet dock at Llanelli. It grew steadily into a network that reached the Amman Valley collieries and Llandilo before its core system passed to the Great Western Railway.

Opened in 1839 between Derby and the London and Birmingham Railway at Hampton in Arden, the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway lasted only five years as an independent company before merging with two neighbors in 1844.

That 1844 merger created the Midland Railway, based in Derby, which grew through further amalgamations into one of Britain's largest railway companies, reaching London St Pancras, Manchester, Carlisle, Birmingham and Bristol before the 1923 Grouping ended its eighty years as a separate business.

Further west, the broad gauge Cornwall Railway opened in 1846 to link Plymouth and Falmouth, building the Royal Albert Bridge over the River Tamar before its chronic shortage of capital forced a sale to the Great Western Railway.

In mid Wales, Cambrian Railways formed in 1864 through the amalgamation of several smaller companies, eventually operating 230 miles of track from its Oswestry headquarters before it too joined the Great Western Railway in 1922.

Back in south Wales, the Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr Railway was authorized in 1875 to reuse part of an 1801 horse drawn plateway, carrying coal from the collieries at Mynydd Mawr for over a century until it closed completely in 1989.

On the Isle of Wight, the Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway was authorized in 1880 to serve the island's thinly populated west, running its own trains after a 1913 break with a neighboring company before it was absorbed into the Southern Railway.

At Newport, the Alexandra (Newport and South Wales) Docks and Railway formed in 1882 to handle the coal and iron ore trade, building docks that ranked among the largest in the world by water area before 1914.

In Kent, two rival companies stopped competing in 1899 and formed the South Eastern and Chatham Railway, a joint working union that held a monopoly on services to the Channel ports until the 1923 Grouping folded it into the Southern Railway.

London saw its own wave of consolidation when the Underground Electric Railways Company of London was established in 1902, taking control of three deep level tube lines and the District Railway before the whole group passed to the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.

The 1923 Grouping itself created the Southern Railway from the South Eastern and Chatham Railway and two other companies, an amalgamation that also absorbed the Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway and built what was then the world's largest electrified railway system before nationalization in 1948.