Bury St Edmunds and Thetford Railway
UK railway company

The Bury St Edmunds and Thetford Railway (B&TR) built the Thetford to Bury St Edmunds line from Thetford to Bury St Edmunds with assistance from the Thetford and Watton Railway. The railway was authorised on 5 July 1873 and opened on 1 March 1876.
Services were operated by the Thetford and Watton Railway until it was taken over by the Great Eastern Railway on 22 July 1878 under the Great Eastern and Bury Saint Edmund's and Thetford Railway Companies Act 1878 (41 & 42 Vict. c. clxxv).
The line was 12.75 miles (21 km) long with the journey taking just under 30 minutes.
See also
Thetford to Bury St Edmunds line
References
RS Joby (1977). Forgotten Railways East Anglia. David & Charles. ISBN 0-7153-7312-9.
“Bury St Edmunds and Thetford Railway” enters the record as uK railway company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bury, Edmunds and Thetford can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5001122. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1873, 1876, 1878 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bury St Edmunds and Thetford Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.