Two years after Spooner Row station closed 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, Attleborough 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.