An unavoidable late start to this year’s AGM, followed by a necessarily lengthy debate about financial matters resulted in the Collections Report being significantly curtailed in order to break for lunch at a reasonable time. So that the full report gets an airing, it is presented here in its unabridged form.
AGM 2025 Collections Report
Comptroller of Collections
In the normal course of events delivery of the Collections Report would naturally fall to Bryan as the Comptroller of Collections. For reasons that I hope will be clear, however, for this year at least, I have that honour.
As members will recall, the Comptroller of Collections is the post that was created following the death of David Geldard and the decision to merge the activities of the former Collection Committee into the Executive Committee. On a day-to-day basis this is working well with me attending to the Study Centre and routine matters, and Bryan, allied with his work on the “Better Way Review”, on the Society’s wider activities — working on higher level strategic issues. For example he and Andy, as our acting Vice Chairman, held a meeting recently with Tony Butler, Derby Museums’ Chief Executive. (Adrian would have represented us as Chairman had an unfortunate health issue not prevented him from doing so). The meeting had the twofold objective of underlining each organisation’s commitment to one another, especially in the form long term partnerships, and our gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges Derby Museum currently face. I am sure everyone will appreciate why this is so important to the Society.
Visitors to the Study Centre
So what of the day-to-day running of the Study Centre? For several years, especially since the pandemic, I have stood here and reported a discernible downturn in the numbers of people physically visiting the Midland Railway Study Centre in order to carry out good old fashioned pencil and paper style research (well, pencil and laptop, perhaps). While we are still a long way from the glory days enjoyed by the Roy F Burrows Trust, I am happy to say that there has been a noticeable uptick in visitors over the last year.
It is very hard to quantify this in practice though. Barely a day passes without at least one visitor through the Study Centre door with an inquisitive purpose of some form, but there is a broad spectrum to the breadth and scope of such enquiries …. even excluding those simply asking when the model railway is running next.
On the most impressive end of that scale this year we have had multiple visits from nonagenarian Patrick Johnson whose use, at least in part, of the Study Centre to research the workings of Normanton station led to his successful and incredibly impressive award of a Master of Arts degree. In the same vein, we were recently visited by Anthony Dawson, an acclaimed scholar in the area of railway uniforms. This was mutually beneficial as while Anthony was able to make a detailed study our modest collection of uniform and allied paperwork, he also imparted a significant amount of really useful advice to us in return. A full report on this will appear in the next Newsletter.
I hope that the several hundred other researchers and visitors to the Study Centre over the last year — whether in person or online — will forgive me for not highlighting them individually, but I can say that without exception we were very happy to have helped and supported their endeavours in every way we can.
Volunteers
The often observed ubiquity of my name in the Newsletter creates a false impression of how the Midland Railway Study Centre works. I invariably use “us” and “we” in referring to our activities, as without the happy (I hope!) band of volunteers who labour, often quite deliberately in the figurative shadows, the Study Centre would not be close to enjoying the high reparation I honestly believe it has. I won’t name them here to save their blushes, but the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday gangs — those who come each week and those who can only do so when their own busy lives allow them to — are a deeply integral part of what we do. Likewise the experts, whom I know will, without exception, rankle at that term, that we turn to for specialist advice when a particularly tricky question arises…. who knows what a short segment latch is (John Miller may not answer!), or the specific MR boiler type used for a M&GN C Class locomotive? I certainly didn’t and the nature of such questions preclude any easy look ups in our one extensive primary sources.
All that, however, sums up for me the fundamental point of what the Midland Railway Society is about.
New acquisitions
Everyone concerned understands the great responsibility placed in us in spending this charity’s funds on our collection. It was at an AGM, albeit many years ago now, that there was a comment from the floor that the then newly proposed formal collecting policy was only so those involved didn’t have to spend their own money to pursue their interest. I took that point-of-view as a salutary lesson, albeit one very unfair to those concerned. We inherited a detailed and well-reasoned Collection Development Policy from the former RFB Trust and this document is available in the Members’ Area of our website for all to see. My point is that those of us involved understand our responsibilities and carefully debate how we use our members’ money in pursuing our Charitable Objectives.
In that spirit, some of our recent and more significant recent acquisitions are on display in the room today, as well as two lithographs we have had cleaned at, it has to be said, notable expense. Members will also be aware that with each update of the Midland Railway Study Centre online catalogue, a PDF is added to the SC website Member’s Area detailing what is contained in the update. A library of ‘back issues’ is also maintained there.
Railway 200 Outreach
It is only April and there is a fair chance of Railway200 overload already. I will be banging on about it on more than one occasion today alone. Suffice in this context then, to simply say that organisations we are assisting under this banner include… Train Operating Companies; East Midlands Railways and C2C (who run their services on the former LTSR lines, something this modern organisation are commendably well aware of), Derbyshire County Council’s Derwent Valley Line Community Rail group and, of course, Alstom. Again, this is not the forum to go into detail, but with all this we need as much support as we can get – both in person on the several days, and logistically in the background. If you are at all interested please get in touch with me.
All this aside, it has been a busy 12 months of outreach activities – such as the team building day of the timetable planning section of EMR, to several groups of students covering a variety of age groups, through an educational partnership Derby Museums have with the Orchestra of the East Midlands. In his report, Adrian has already mentioned the visit, last June, of Andrew McLean from the NRM and his Science Museum Group colleagues.
I will conclude by thanking everyone involved once again and would encourage anyone with questions or any interest in the area of collections to get in touch with me.
Dave Harris
Coordinator, Midland Railway Study Centre
www.midlandrailwaystudycentre.org.uk
