Crewe and Shrewsbury Railway

The Crewe and Shrewsbury Railway was a line built by the London and North Western Railway, authorised by an Act of Parliament in August 1853 and opened on 1 September 1858, running 32.5 miles from Crewe in Cheshire to Shrewsbury in Shropshire, where it met the jointly LNWR- and Great Western Railway-owned Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway. Built chiefly to carry coal from South Wales into industrial northwest England and finished goods in the other direction, it proved commercially successful enough to be doubled to two tracks by 1862. The company was absorbed into the London Midland and Scottish Railway at the 1923 Grouping and later into British Railways at nationalisation; its branch lines closed gradually after the Second World War as road transport took traffic, but the Crewe to Shrewsbury line itself remains open today as the northern section of Network Rail's Welsh Marches Line. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/