Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway

The Great Northern and Great Eastern Joint Railway, colloquially referred to as "the Joint Line"^[1] was a railway line connecting Doncaster and Lincoln with March and Huntingdon in the eastern counties of England. It was owned jointly by the Great Northern Railway (GNR) and the Great Eastern Railway (GER). It was formed by transferring certain route sections from the parent companies, and by the construction of a new route between Spalding and Lincoln, and a number of short spurs and connections. It was controlled by a Joint Committee, and the owning companies operated their own trains with their own rolling stock. The Joint Line amounted to nearly 123 miles (198 km) of route.

The motivation for its formation was chiefly the desire of the GER to get direct access to the coalfields of South Yorkshire and elsewhere, and the wish of the GNR to discourage more ambitious incursion by the GER into its own territory, as well as the provision of relief to its congested main line. The dominant traffic was coal, but a wide variety of manufactured and agricultural products was carried. There was some local passenger business, and some long-distance passenger trains used the route.

The route became a trunk artery for freight traffic, especially coal, and a large marshalling complex developed at Whitemoor, near March, for the sorting of wagons. In the 1920s a modern mechanised system was installed at Whitemoor, the most advanced such installation in Great Britain at the time.

Running largely through flat terrain, the line had numerous level crossings, especially in the southern section, and as wagon-load freight movements of coal declined after about 1960, the cost of operating the line became excessive compared to the use made of it. In 1982 the section from Spalding to Whitemoor was closed, trains being diverted via the Spalding to Peterborough line; in addition many intermediate stations on the remaining route section were closed. The nomenclature "the Joint Line" was transferred to mean the route via Peterborough.

In the 21st century congestion on the East Coast Main Line had again become a problem, and resignalling, loading gauge enhancements, and partial upgrade of the remaining route took place, to enable container freight trains from Felixstowe and elsewhere to use the line; the project was commissioned in 2015. Most of the line remains in use for that traffic and a local passenger service.