Mind the Gates Atlas

Rise and fall: two centuries of railway, year by year

Pick a year and see every railway line in Great Britain that was open then. Drag the slider or press play to run through two centuries. You can show just the public railways or just the heritage and private ones, and click any line to see when it opened, when it closed, and where that came from. There are 7,988 stretches of line here, drawn on OpenStreetMap's map. Where nobody has recorded a date we have estimated one, and the panel tells you how rough that estimate is.

2026
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A few things worth knowing. Public railways means any line built for the public to use, passengers or freight, whoever owns it now, so HS1 and the Channel Tunnel count. Heritage and private covers preserved railways, tourist lines and private operators. A preserved line shows as the public railway it was until it closed, then as a heritage line from the day it reopened. The clock starts in 1825, when the Stockton and Darlington opened. Lines that began as horse-drawn waggonways or tramroads are dated from when trains first ran on them, and horse lines that never got trains are left out. A handful of lines open today picked up a closure date from their parent line and never got a reopening date, so they look closed mid-century and come back in the final year. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); coastline from Natural Earth.

Sources

Here is where the dates come from. Each line's panel names its own sources, and every date we settled by hand is written up, source by source, in the route-history dataset behind this map, along with the research notes.