Great Western Railway

The Great Western Railway was a British railway company founded in 1833 that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It received its enabling Act of Parliament in 1835 and ran its first trains in 1838, completing the initial London to Bristol route in 1841. The company was engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who built it to a broad gauge of 7 feet, though a series of amalgamations from 1854 also brought standard gauge operation, and the last broad gauge services ran in 1892.