Whereas there was usually huge celebration in each town when the railway arrived, after experiencing the abuse of monopoly power there were usually even greater celebrations when a second railway company opened.
The Great Eastern Railway had secured an almost complete monopoly over the whole of East Anglia. But to their horror, the Midland & Great Northern Railway was formed in 1893.
The M&GN was tiny: a minnow to the GER's pike. But it had the backing of two very strong parent companies, one of which was the notoriously expansionary Midland Railway. The arrival in Norwich of the M&GN was a wake-up call for the GER.
The photos in this post are almost all of the M&GN's Norwich terminus, Norwich (City) Station, located just to the north of the central district (plus one shot of their city-centre office).
The main building was a grand, lumpen-Italianate confection, and the station had four platforms. These were arranged like a tongue -- two long platforms on the outer edges, and two smaller bay platforms extending half-way up the tongue (in this next photo you can see at the left edge the end of a van, which is sitting in the bay):
And here we're looking along the other long platform, back towards the main building:
While the platforms survived to the end, the main building was destroyed by Nazi German bombing in the 1942 Baedeker Raids -- the remains of City Station are in the top left quadrant of this shot, surrounded by hollowed-out buildings:
Temporary wooden huts were built on the site, to service the station:
They were never replaced, and the station closed to passengers in 1959 -- here it is, almost at the end, with a two-car Metro-Cammell diesel multiple unit (later "Class 101") waiting to depart:
The inconvenience of multiple stations serving one town or city had to be weighed against the advantage of competing lines forcing the railway companies to up their services for customers.
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