Disused railway lines and closed stations in Essex

93 miles of disused railway
57 closed stations
75 stations open today
18 named lost lines

Essex has 93 miles of disused railway and 57 closed stations, against 75 stations still open today. That is 0.8 closed for every station still served. The longest lost line is the Colne Valley and Halstead Railway, with 13 miles of its route inside Essex.

See Essex’s lost railways on the map

The map opens on the county with the disused lines and closed stations drawn over today’s network. Tap any closed station for its history, or any grey line for its name.

What is left of it

The 93 miles of lost railway in Essex break down as 70 miles with the track lifted and the trackbed still traceable, 16 miles built over or ploughed out, with little or no trace left and 6.2 miles with track still in place but no trains. These are OpenStreetMap’s own distinctions, made by the people who surveyed each stretch, so a line can appear under more than one state along its length.

Lost railway lines in Essex

18 named lines with disused track in the county, longest stretch first. The mileage is the part inside Essex; a line crossing the border is counted on both sides.

Line	Miles in county
Colne Valley and Halstead Railway	13
Kelvedon and Tollesbury Light Railway	10
Woodham Ferrers to Maldon Line	8.3
The Flitch Way	7.6
Saffron Walden Railway	7.1
Elsenham & Thaxted Light Railway	5.8
Witham to Maldon Line	5.7
Colne Valley Branch	4.6
Brightlingsea Branch	4.0
Bishops Stortford to Braintree Line	2.9
Stour Valley Railway	2.9
Harwich Branch	1.9
Corringham Light Railway	1.7
West Thurrock Sidings	0.8
Chesterford to Six Mile Bottom Branch	0.6
Southend Pier Railway	0.6
Procter and Gamble Siding	0.4
Tilbury Riverside Branch	0.4

Closed railway stations in Essex

All 57 closed and former stations in Essex, A to Z. Each name opens the map on the station; the Wikipedia link, where there is one, has its history.

Stations still open in Essex

75 stations in Essex still have a train service. The busiest are Stansted Airport (10.1 million a year), Chelmsford (7.0 million a year), Shenfield (5.8 million a year), Colchester (3.6 million a year) and Grays (3.6 million a year). Every one has its own page, with the stations you can reach from it directly and how often the trains run: see the A to Z of stations.

Lost railways nearby

Greater London, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Kent, Cambridgeshire and Surrey.

About these figures

The disused lines are the stretches OpenStreetMap records as disused, abandoned, razed or dismantled railway, measured segment by segment and given to the county each segment lies in. The closed stations are Wikidata’s record of British railway stations no longer in service, kept where they are not within a few hundred metres of a station still open. County boundaries are today’s ceremonial counties, with unitary authorities folded into the county they sit in, from the Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0; contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024). Historic county lines were different, and a closed station a mile over the border is on the neighbouring page.

Every county · About the disused lines layer · About the closed stations