MRS Journal No. 57 (Winter 2014)

Table of Contents

• The Cromford Canal under the Midland Railway / By Hugh Potter
• Private Midland Railway Stations In Nottinghamshire / By Roger Brettle
• An Early Locomotive Pressure Gauge
• Foreigners / By Ian Howard
• Irchester Junction, 1894
• Peak Forest, c1866 And 2–2–2ST Argus / By Peter Witts
• My Midland Station — 3 / By David Ablitt, John Earl, Howard Sprenger, Giles Brown & Peter Draper
• Trains On The Kettering To Cambridge Line / By Robin Cullup
• Query Corner
• Comments on Items in Previous Journals
• 4–2–2 No. 670 at Bath Shed

• Front cover
  This is one of the lovely lithographs (some coloured, as here) that Samuel Russell produced to celebrate the building of the North Midland Railway. Lack of funds prevented his hopes of producing a book of the complete set; the last straw came when his appeal for help to the Directors of the North Midland was rejected. He recovered some of his expenses by sale of individual sheets, and a useful number of those have survived the intervening years.
  This is one of the more famous ones, the view at Bull Bridge that brings three modes of transport together, with the most modern, the North Midland Railway, taking prominence. A narrow-boat was being drawn across the aqueduct taking the Cromford canal over the railway, whilst a train approached from the north. Note that the depiction of a mast and sail on the boat is purely artistic licence. The turn-pike road from Ambergate to Alfreton ran through the arch to the right of the railway, and Russell had drawn a two-wheeled wagon approaching through it. The two gangers re-setting the sleepers on the down line complete this unique scene.
  [Friends of the Cromford Canal No. 244]

Rear cover
These eleven tickets represent those that the Midland Railway produced for their experiment with Zone Tickets in the Sheffield Area. The details are discussed on page 27 by Peter Jones in his response to a snippet from the Railway Service Journal of April 1904 in the previous issue of our Journal. In that snippet, the introduction by the Midland of Zone tickets for the Sheffield area was noted, without any great detail being given. Peter’s discussion rectifies that omission, and members should read Peter’s text, referring, as necessary, to the images of the tickets on the back page. I am sorry that this is inconvenient and against the general principles that we adopt for laying out this Journal. Our policy is, wherever possible, to keep each illustration as close as possible to the text that it illuminates. If we had done that here the images of the tickets would have been in the grey-scale in which our photographs appear, and readers would not have been able to see the important use of colour that the Midland made to identify ticket types.
[Courtesy of the Great Western Society Museum]