25 Places with two stations: 16 Gainsborough

Saturday 9th August 2025

The most conveniently sited of Gainsborough’s two railway stations is Gainsborough Central. As its name implies, it’s located right bang in the centre of town, next to a large shopping complex and massive Tesco and a short walk from the bus station.

The only snag is the station sees just two train departures a day on weekdays and nothing at weekends. If you want to travel to Grimsby and Cleethorpes at 10:44 or Retford, Worksop or Sheffield at 14:18 on a weekday then it’s the ideal station for you. Anything else, then forget it.

You’ll need to make your way to Gainsborough’s other station called Gainsborough Lea Road located not so conveniently about a 20 minute walk due south from the town centre on the road to Lea, funnily enough.

Even more odd, despite being in the south of the town it was renamed Gainsborough North in 1923 – unsurprisingly a name that lasted for just a few months that year.

From here Northern trains will take you once an hour to Lincoln (via Saxlby) or Leeds (via Retford, Worksop, Sheffield, Barnsley and Wakefield) supplemented by East Midlands Railway trains linking the town with Doncaster or Peterborough (via Lincoln) five times a day.

On Sundays there’s just an hourly service between Lincoln and Sheffield (with some journeys continuing to Huddersfield) operated by Northern with no East Midlands Railway service.

Which is another oddity as the station is run by East Midlands Railway who are by far the minority train operator serving the station. Well, when I say “run by” there’s no ticket office or staff present, just an East Midlands Railway ticket machine and a rather convoluted, yet charming, arrangement for step free access to the platforms complete with rather endearing notices, signs and murals as you can see in the following photos.

Up those rather sorry looking stairs which could do with some renovation…

… you’ll find Platform 1 for Lincoln (and Peterborough) and you’ll arrive at an equally rather sorry looking shelter…

… with six seats…

… and a couple of posters, one depicting the EMR network, but unfortunately not the Northern network (so, no mention of Gainsborough Central), although I’m sure GBR (“coming soon”) will quickly sort that out.

At least the timetables on display by the ticket machine do include Northern’s Leeds to Lincoln service as well as EMR’s Doncaster to Peterborough.

The platform itself has some nice floral tubs…

… but no other seats, and the gap between the platform and train doors is one of the most substantial I’ve seen on the network.

Platform 2 is much better, having only opened in 2019 in a £3 million investment…

… to replace the old one – opposite Platform 1 – which has now been demolished…

… although you can still see the convoluted ramp arrangement which allowed passengers to reach it.

The new platform is sited further south than the old one and only partly opposite Platform 1…

… and has a new long ramp arrangement to provide step-free access.

Surprisingly, for a £3 million investment, passenger facilities are minimal, comprising a bog standard shelter…

… with those uncomfortable individual bench type seats…

… and nothing else. Not even a dot-matrix display sign to tell you when the next train is coming (as Platform 1 has in the shelter). On the opening of the new Platform 2 back in 2019 Network Rail announced “the next stage of improvement work at Gainsborough Lea Road station, to replace platform 1, is expected to begin in 2021”. It looks like that’s gone back in the pending file. Gary Walsh, Route Director for Network Rail’s East Midlands Route, said at the time: “we are committed to making improvements at stations to improve the railway for passengers. The platforms at Gainsborough Lea Road needed updating and this work will improve the look and feel of the station.” 

Funnily enough, I rather prefer the rather quirky access arrangement and shelter to Platform 1 which has a bit of character about it rather than Platform 2’s boring bog standard finish but I can certainly see the structure needs some attention – and soon.

Outside, the rather grand station building has long been redeployed into other (or no) uses…

… and there’s a convenient bus stop outside for Stagecoach’s buses on hourly route 100 into the town centre and Scunthorpe as featured in a previous blog as well as less frequent routes.

The Office of Rail and Road reckon Lea Road’s passenger exits and entrances in 2023/24 were 185,000 which obviously eclipses its neighbour Gainsborough Central which, with its 510 train departures a year, managed to clock up 1,676 passengers. That’s actually quite impressive giving an average of around 3 passengers either boarding or alighting each of the two daily departures.

As you can see from the above photo, when I visited at the end of last month another passenger did board the 14:18 departure with me. The facilities at Central are naturally rather limited, but it’s interesting to see there are more seats than at Lea Road on both platforms …

… with a shelter on each, and a rather rudimentary one at that (with open sides) on the westbound Platform 1.

There’s a footbridge to give access to the westbound platform…

… and for step free access, there’s a barrow crossing which any passenger can use by just opening the gate.

The actual gate to platform 2 itself looked rather narrow compared to the barrow crossing gate…

… which made me wonder whether it would pass the “accessible” test.

As you can see the ticket machine is just inside. On the other side of the tracks there’s a signal box and a semaphore signal just to add to the character of the place.

Inside the shelter on Platform 2 is a poster display promoting the Gainsborough Heritage Centre which is open on Tuesdays and Saturdays between 10:00 and 16:00 and sounds like a delightful place to visit, but sadly I was there on Wednesday of last week.

The photographs of the original station (complete with its roof) look absolutely amazing.

What a come down from the station’s heyday to what it is today. By the early 1990s British Rail had reduced the, by then, three trains a day between Sheffield and Cleethorpes to only run on Saturdays but in 2019 the Gods smiled on the line (thanks to vigorous campaigning by the ‘Friends of the Brigg and Lincoln Line’ with a new hourly service (yes, I know, hourly) to Retford and Sheffield. This was achieved by Northern extending the trains that previously terminated at Retford further eastwards on to Gainsborough Central making for the most regular service the station had received since opening in 1849 (according to Wikipedia).

I took a ride on the new hourly service during its first week when Northern was in celebratory mode with bunting to mark the occasion.

As mentioned at the start, Gainsborough Central is conveniently located in the town centre, such as it is, right next door to Marshall’s Yard…

… housing many well known retail names now occupying what was almost certainly railway land at one time, presumably containing a marshalling yard.

As you can see, there’s a rather nice old style British Railways sign on the wall with an arrow pointing passengers in the direction of the station…

… which is up a long footpath up a hill.

Just on the right as you start the climb up the footpath, a Community Noticeboard caught my eye…

… except to be able to read what’s posted, you have to climb over a small fence/barrier but when you do, some very thoughtful person has not only posted the timetable for the train…

Looking at the OS map extract above, it’s uncanny that here’s another station pair to be featured in this series where one station is almost exactly on the same line of longitude as the other – with Gainsborough joining Canterbury, Helensburgh, New Mills, and Yeovil with such a feature.

Finally, historically, Gainsborough Central beat Gainsborough Lea Road on to the rail network by 18 years, being opened by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway in 1849. Lea Road was opened in 1867 by the Great Northern Railway (GNR) although that company had run trains to just west of Central from 1849 along a single track with its trains from Lincoln reversing there before continuing to Retford. GNR were keen to extend to Doncaster, so when that line was built the new station at Lea Road opened.

Sadly Gainsborough Central is the second least served station to be featured in this series (after Reddish South) and it looks like it’ll remain that way for some years to come.

Roger French

Did you catch the 15 previous blogs in this series? 1: Hertford; 2: Canterbury. 3: Wigan, 4 Dorchester, 5 Windsor, 6 Wakefield, 7 Reddish, 8 Yeovil, 9 Newark-on-Trent, 10 New Mills, 11 Tyndrum, 12 St Albans, 13 Falkirk, 14 Catford, 15 Helensburgh.

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