page_title: London and Birmingham Railway
section_title: Opening
hierarchical_section_title: London and Birmingham Railway / History / Opening
caption_attribution_description: English: The plaque to the right of the entrance of the Curzon Street railway station in Birmingham, England. UK
context_page_description: The London and Birmingham Railway was an early railway company in the United Kingdom, existing from 1833 to 1846, when it became part of the London and North Western Railway.
  The 112-mile railway line which the company opened in 1838, between London and Birmingham, was the first intercity line to be built into London. It is now the southern section of the West Coast Main Line.
  The line was engineered by Robert Stephenson. It started at Euston Station in London, went north-west to Rugby, where it turned west to Coventry and on to Birmingham. It terminated at Curzon Street Station, which it shared with the Grand Junction Railway, whose adjacent platforms gave an interchange with full connectivity between Liverpool, Manchester and London.
context_section_description: The line had been planned to open at the same time as the Grand Junction Railway which entered Birmingham from the north. However great difficulty in constructing the Kilsby Tunnel in Northamptonshire delayed the opening. The first part of the line between Euston Station and Boxmoor (Hemel Hempstead) opened on 20 July 1837. The line was not finished in time for the coronation of Queen Victoria on 28 June 1838, but aware of the lucrative traffic the event would generate, the company opened the north end of the line, between Birmingham and Rugby, and the south end from London to a temporary station at Denbigh Hall near Bletchley with a stagecoach shuttle service linking the two parts to allow through journeys to London. The line was officially fully opened on 17 September 1838, with the first passenger train from London to Birmingham arriving that day. The first London-to-Birmingham trains took ​5 ¹⁄₂ hours to complete the 112 ¹⁄₂-mile (181.1 km) journey. 
  It has often been claimed that initially, owing to the lack of power available to early locomotives, trains from Euston were cable-hauled up the relatively steep incline to Camden by a stationary steam engine. However, this was denied by Peter Lecount, one of the L&BR engineers, who wrote in his 'History of the Railway connecting London and Birmingham' (1839), page 48: "It is not because locomotives cannot draw a train of carriages up this incline that a fixed engine and endless rope are used, for they can and have done so, but because the Company are restricted, by their Act of Parliament, from running locomotive engines nearer London than Camden Town." The railway opened from Euston on 20 July 1837; the stationary engines and rope haulage did not commence until 27 September, and handled all trains from 14 October 1837. Until then, and whenever the rope system was stopped for repairs, locomotives hauled the trains up the incline. From November 1843 some expresses were worked without recourse to the rope, and from 15 July 1844 the rope working ceased permanently.
caption: Plaque at Curzon Street station commemorating the arrival of the first train from London to Birmingham
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