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Circa 1852 illustration of a LNWR passenger locomotive.

LNWR No. 1881, a Webb 0-8-0 four cylinder compound - frontispiece from the The Railway Magazine June 1903.

The London and North Western Railway (LNWR) was a railway company of the United Kingdom which existed between 1846 and 1922. It was created by the merger of three railway companies - the Grand Junction Railway, the London and Birmingham Railway and the Manchester and Birmingham Railway, and is effectively an ancestor of today's West Coast Main Line.

The LNWR was known as the 'Premier Line'. Though disputed by many, it may be thought that it deserved this title because the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first passenger railway in the world, was one of its ancestors through its merger with the Grand Junction Railway).

As the largest joint stock company in the United Kingdom, it collected a greater revenue than any other company. It served some of Britain's largest cities: Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and (through co-operation with the Caledonian Railway) Edinburgh and Glasgow. It also handled the Irish Mail for the Government between Euston and Holyhead.

The LNWR became a constituent of the London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) railway when the railways of Great Britain were merged in the grouping of 1923. Nationalisation followed. Some former LNWR routes were subsequently closed, notably the lines running East to West across the Midlands (eg Peterborough to Northampton, Cambridge to Oxford), but others were developed as part of the Inter City network, with the main lines from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Carlisle electrified in the 1960s and 1970s with trains now running up to 125 mph. Other lines survive as part of commuter networks around major cities such as Birmingham and Manchester.

The LNWR's main engineering works were at Crewe (locomotives) and Wolverton (carriages and wagons). The locomotive livery is described as 'blackberry black'.

• Canada Dock Branch from Edge Hill railway station on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway through the northern Liverpool to Canada Dock in 1866.
• Sections of the former L&NWR are preserved as the Nene Valley Railway and Northampton & Lamport Railway, the latter giving the name Premier Line to its quarterly journal.[1]

• Locomotives of the London and North Western Railway
• Rail transport in Great Britain
• UK topics
• The Nicky Line
• Victoria Tunnel
• North London Railway

• London and North Western Railway Society
• GNR / LNWR Joint Railway Leicestershire