Thetford railway station is on the Breckland line in the east of England, serving the town of Thetford, Norfolk. The line runs between in the west and in the east. Thetford is situated between and , from London Liverpool Street via . The station is managed by Greater Anglia, which operates most of the services, typically one to two trains per hour in either direction. East Midlands Railway operates a regular service between Norwich and via and . It is the nearest station to the Center Parcs holiday village at Elveden Forest, approximately five miles to the west. History The Bill for the Norwich & Brandon Railway (N&BR) received Royal Assent on 10 May 1844. The line was to link with an Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) project of a line from Newport in Essex to Brandon in Suffolk. Once complete the line would enable trains to travel from Norwich to London. Work started on the line in 1844. One month before the N&BR opened, a Bill authorising the amalgamation of the Yarmouth & Norwich Railway with the N&BR came into effect, and so Thetford station became a Norfolk Railway asset. The line opened on 30 July 1845, including the Eastern Counties Railway Brandon to Newport line. However, the line only went as far as Trowse, in the suburbs of Norwich, as the contractors were having to build a swing bridge to cross the River Wensum. Thetford station was, when opened, located between Brandon and Roudham Junction. The ECR and its rival, the Eastern Union Railway (EUR), were both sizing up the NR to acquire and expand their railway empire. The ECR trumped the EUR by taking over the NR, including Thetford station, on 8 May 1848. By the 1860s the railways in East Anglia were in financial trouble, and most were leased to the Eastern Counties Railway, which wished to amalgamate formally but could not obtain government agreement for this until an Act of Parliament on 7 August 1862, when the Great Eastern Railway (GER) was formed by the amalgamation. Actually, Thetford became a GER station on 1 July 1862 when the GER took over the ECR and the EUR before the Bill received the Royal Assent. Also in the 1860s the GER opened a line from Roudham towards Swaffham. Roudham was renamed Roudham Junction. A decade later the Bill received Royal Assent, promoting a line linking (on the Ipswich