Records and the Midland Railway

The Presidential Address given by Dr John Gough to members of the Midland Railway Society in the Midland Hotel, Derby, on 11th October 1997.

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It is my privilege today to deliver the first Presidential Address to the Midland Railway Society. The company we remember, celebrate, and study was by anyone’s measure one of the greatest of our pre-Grouping railways – arguably a member of the top trio, and for most of us here today probably the best of those companies. It certainly had some of the finest main lines between major centres, provided passenger services in some of the best rolling stock of its period, catered for the culinary needs of its passengers far better than any of its competitors, and carried huge quantities of the nation’s coal – and beer. When the Midland passed into the London Midland & Scottish Railway on 1st January 1923 two of its principal passenger routes, to Scotland and Manchester, fell rather under the shadow of their London & North Western counterparts, and it was not long before the fine new port of Heysham came to be served from Euston rather than from St Pancras – all this however much Derby may have exerted its influence in other spheres. Nationalisation followed, and regional boundaries were drawn that paid scant regard to Midland routes (despite the short-lived concession in the form of penetrating lines). Nevertheless, at least two sections of the Midland, the London to Sheffield portion of the main line and the old West Line, retain some significance, and St Pancras is set to become probably the most important of all London’s stations. In this sense at least, the Midland is not something vanished into history but lives on as a part of the modern railway.

I wondered whether to talk about a small topic in considerable detail – the routes of the London & Manchester express services, for example, or passenger traffic over the Dore South Curve – or whether to take a more general topic. I came to the conclusion that the latter was more suitable for an occasion such as this, and so today I want to speak about records, and in doing so to bring together my interests in the Midland Railway, in railway history generally, and in the Railway Heritage Committee. Only one private industry is subject to control by a statutory committee as far as its records are concerned, and that is the railway industry. In establishing the Railway Heritage Committee under the privatisation act of 1993,^[1] Parliament recognised the unique importance of the railway heritage. The committee’s rôle was then greatly extended by the Railway Heritage Act 1996,^[2] and it now has the necessary powers to ensure that the records and artefacts of the railway industry in private ownership continue to be preserved for the use of future historians and the interest of the general public (though important issues of finance remain to be resolved). In the case of the records, Parliament has thus willed that what is arguably the world’s richest and most important industrial archive should not simply stop with denationalisation. A major element in the significance of this archive lies in its continuity over a period of a century and three quarters during which the form and structure of the railway industry have changed substantially more than once. History does not end: our concern now is to ensure continuity of record at this time of great change in the railway industry.

What I propose to do is look at the sorts of records of the railway industry we have through the example of the Midland company and its successors. However, I want to comment briefly first on why the railway records are so extensive and so important. The private railway companies were great hoarders – there was a great reluctance to throw anything away, and the economics of storage did not weight as heavily in former years as they do now. Moreover, in many cases there was a long, continuous presence in a single freehold location (like Derby, Euston, or Paddington), with a consequent lack of any incentive for a clear-out. And, with the amount of paper generated within the railway industry, there was plenty to keep.  Jack Simmons reports a conversation with E H Fowkes just after the latter had received the Stockton & Darlington records into the then recently-established York office of British Transport Historical Records in which Fowkes expressed the view that this company – which had an independent existence of only some forty years before amalgamating with the North Eastern in 1862 – had never thrown away so much as an envelope!^[3] Interestingly, the North Eastern is the first company for which Professor Simmons has been able to find an officer other than the Company Secretary having authority for records: one Benjamin Dann signed himself as “Keeper of Muniments” in 1859 “when he reported that in the Old Rectory at Gateshead he had found hundreds of volumes containing records of the traffic at individual stations on the company’s lines, lying confusedly on the floor of an upper room there, the windows of which were unglazed, so that water streamed in upon them whenever it rained.” By 1926 the Registrar of the new London Midland & Scottish Railway, R Carrington Willis, was characterising the records stored at Euston as “this junk”,^[4] and in its General Purposes Bill that year the company sought powers to destroy certain material more than twenty years old. Parliament refused.

Although at nationalisation there was a proposal to bring the British Transport Commission under the Public Record Office Act,^[5] this was successfully opposed by the Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Transport responsible for the Bill, one S S Wilson (who in 1960 became Keeper of the Public Records). In 1951 the BTC established its own British Transport Historical Records Office. When the Commission was abolished under the 1962 Act,^[6] the records were transferred to the British Railways Board. Then came Labour’s 1968 Act,^[7] Section 144 of which gave the Secretary of State for Education (that is, to all intents and purposes, in this case, the Science Museum) first refusal if the Department of Transport consented to the disposal by the BRB of any of the records vested in it under the 1962 Act – the transfer to be free of charge. For a number of reasons there was then a considerable debate, and it was finally announced in May 1971 that the historical records were to remain in London and become the responsibility of the Public Record Office. The PRO took over in April 1972, and five years later the British Transport Historical Records were the first documents to be moved into the new building at Kew. Shortly after this the BRB passed title in this material to the PRO, so that all the pre-1977 records became government property. For nearly twenty years there has been a non-statutory relationship between the PRO and the BRB. There was further consideration of whether the BRB should be brought under the provisions of the Public Records Act, and in 1984 an Order in Council provided that when records are transferred to the PRO they are treated as public records (save for staff records, which become public records only when they are seventy-five years old). Thus, when a Railtrack-owned document created by the Midland Cross Country Sub-Sector of BRB’s InterCity Sector crosses the threshold of the PRO it becomes a public record.

Let us now turn back to the railway industry itself. When the railways were promoted they needed to raise large sums of money for construction, and this could only practically be done through a joint-stock company. To be able to build their lines they needed powers for the compulsory purchase of land. Only Parliament could establish a joint-stock company and grant powers for compulsory purchase, and the parliamentary process means that we have extensive records of the creation of the railways, both officially in terms of the deposited plans, the notices published in the London Gazette and in local newspapers, and the records of the proceedings in Parliament themselves, and at a more popular level in news items in local newspapers. (There were, of course, some works built, or at least commenced, without powers, such as the Kentish Town Curve and the Leicester & Trent Widening.)

Of course, the involvement with the state and therefore with the official record certainly did not end with the passing of the act. Because each company existed by virtue of an Act of Parliament, every expansion and change of purpose required additional powers: new lines, hotels, ships, refreshment rooms, etc  all involved the parliamentary process. The extent of this archive is considerable: Charles Clinker^[8] tells us that between the passing of the first railway act in 1758, in the reign of George II – that authorising Charles Brandling’s Waggon Way^[9] – and the end of the 1960s there were about 6,800 railway acts and that a total of 1,215 railway companies were incorporated. Moreover, Government could not leave a major industry serving and impacting on both other industries and the general public entirely to its own devices. Just look at Bigg’s General Railway Acts^[10] to see how much public legislation affected the railways even in the early days – and the quantity certainly did not diminish. Thus there was a continuing interface with Government, particularly through the Board of Trade and its inspectorate. (The relationship was not always a loving one.^[11]) We duly have the records on the Board of Trade side. As these passed in due course to the Ministry of Transport, they appear in the “MT“ series at Kew. Everyone who has had anything to do with the history of signalling knows the MT 6 files, which contain all the inspection records for the pre-Grouping railways.^[12] The MT 7 index-volumes seem to be rather less well known, even though they conveniently shew us what is missing from the MT 6 files! (Thus, for example, we know when the final inspection of the rebuilt Leicester station took place, but we do not have the report of that inspection.) The sequence continues in MT 29 to cover the Grouped railways. For the Midland we have a very good run of company copies of Board of Trade reports,^[13] but these are a poor substitute for the real thing in that they are in no sense the full correspondence files that we see in the Governmental record. The Board of Trade also produced the annual volumes of accident reports, and other material such as the returns on block-telegraph signalling,^[14] all of great value to the historian.

The railways’ own records begin with the forming of their provisional committees to prepare the scheme to go to Parliament. Once an act had been obtained and a company formed, there were certain legal requirements to be observed and records were duly generated. Of companies later absorbed by the Midland, the records of the Mansfield & Pinxton start in 1817,^[15] those of the Leicester & Swannington in 1829.^[16] As everyone here knows, the Midland Railway itself was formed by an amalgamation in 1844 of three companies that obtained their acts in 1836.  Of these, the records of the Midland Counties start in 1834, of the North Midland in 1835, and of the Birmingham & Derby Junction from 1836.^[17] By the latter part of the Victorian era the major railway companies, of which the Midland of course was one, were huge, in terms both of capital and of the numbers of staff they employed, and their tentacles spread widely. The largest were well-nigh self-reliant. The Midland, for example, not only ran its trains and maintained its infrastructure but had a significant civil engineering capacity, was a steamship operator, built its own rolling-stock and its own signalling, could equip and furnish its stations, and ran a major hotel and catering business. The London & North Western even made its own steel and rolled its own rails. All of this business had to be managed, and its management generated voluminous records – no other industry so many.

In addition to the companies’ own records there is also what I will call the record of commentary. No other industry was as central to the economic life of the country over as long a period as the railways. And although the railway is – and always has been – a commercial enterprise and not a public service (even though its services may of course be purchased on behalf of the public) – it has never been very far from politics, as the events of the last five years demonstrate only too clearly. Partly because of this general importance of the industry and partly because from their very beginnings the railways have exercised a fascination for the general public, there is a massive published record, in newspapers, journals, and books. The early books and periodicals devoted to the financial interests or to civil and mechanical engineering matters – their origin is easily accounted for. But it is remarkable to see how early a popular literature developed. No-one with Midland interests has not come across F S Williams. Well, remember that his first work, its first edition appearing in 1852 when its author was only twenty-three, was Our Iron Roads,^[18] a full, excellent, and well-written account for the general reader of the projection and management of railways – drawing heavily on the Midland Railway, then less than a decade old, for many of its examples and owing a great deal to the close connections Williams clearly already had with that company’s senior management.

We have, then, an industry which throughout its long existence has generated a huge public, internal, and popular record. Since the technology of steel wheel on steel rail has certainly nowhere near reached its sell-by date, this is a continuing record and not a closed one. It provides a wealth of material of enormous interest to a very wide range of professional and amateur students. For economic, social, and political history, for historical geography, and for the history of technology the records of the railways are vital to us, no matter whether the subject of research is the career of a lowly individual railwayman, a single aspect of the technology (like the effect of the hammer-blow from locomotives on girder bridges, which is an example I have come across of late), or a grand survey of the impact of the railway on the landscape or on the economic life of the country. It is both the richness and the continuity of this archive that makes it so important, and it is the task of the Railway Heritage Committee to try to ensure the sustained continuity of this archive of so much value to so many.

Let us turn now specifically to the Midland and consider some points arising from its records – or their absence from the collection that has come down to us. First, a point from the company’s pre-history. It is Williams^[19] who tells us that on 16th August 1832 the Eastwood Coalmasters (the Erewash Valley Coalowners) at their regular weekly meeting at the Sun Inn at Eastwood entered into their minutes the declaration that: “there remains no other plan for their adoption than to attempt to lay a railway from these collieries to the town of Leicester.” Williams refers specifically to minutes, and he actually quotes from them. From his provable reliability elsewhere we should not hesitate to believe that he really did see them. Yet we now look in vain for any reference to these minutes in the National Register of Archives. Their location is not officially known – though Peter Stevenson^[20] believes they do still exist. These are non-railway records with a direct bearing on railway history. Access to them would help us to understand better the context in which the Midland Counties Railway was promoted.

As I have said, Williams enjoyed the inestimable advantage of knowing, and evidently being trusted by, members of the top management of the Midland. He was very clearly given privileged access to internal documentation, he was invited on private trips, as over the London & Bedford line before its opening, or over the Settle & Carlisle line before that too was opened, and he had the chance to talk to the people involved in the events he describes. He could draw on what we should now call oral history as well as on the written records (as, of course, can some of the other notable early writers of railway history). For example, his vivid account of the impact of the shortage of money for the building of the Leicester & Hitchin line,^[21] complete with “quotations” from the words of the engineer – who in turn quotes “old John Ellis” – appears to be the source of all later accounts, some of which appear to go rather beyond what Williams tells us.

Williams writes: “The cuttings are fifty or sixty feet deep, and the embankments are fifty or sixty feet high, as deep and as high as they could with safety be carried. “But if you could not alter your banks and cuttings,” we inquired, “might you not have got over the difficulty, or at any rate diminished it, by tunnelling?” “Yes,” replied the engineer; “by putting tunnels at your summit levels, and viaducts at the lowest part of your embankments the proportion of earthwork would have remained the same, and the levels might have been immensely improved. But there was one objection to that: we hadn’t the money to do it with. It was just at the time of the Russian war; money and men were very difficult to get, and the shareholders could not be induced to raise more than a million, with which to construct a line sixty-three miles long. ‘Now, Charles Liddell and John Crossley,’ said old John Ellis, ‘there are £900,000 to make your line with. If it can’t be done for that, it can’t be done at all. So you must put all your fine notions into your pockets, and go and do it for £15,000 a mile. And then there is the rolling stock to find.’ ‘And it took,’ said Mr. Crossley, ‘a great deal of “scraping,” to get it done.’  Mr. Brassey was the contractor for the work, and Mr. Horn was his agent.” “Which Brassey?” we asked. “Thomas Brassey,” was the reply. “There was only one Brassey. There are Brasseys who are members of Parliament, and that sort of thing, but there was only one Brassey – that was Thomas.”

One modern history of the Midland states of the line: “In order to conserve both labour and capital, arrangements were made for the major cuttings to be reduced in depth. Consequently the line followed a switchback course that has been cursed by the Locomotive Department at Derby for more than a century.”^[22] And a more recent treatment has: “Planned originally with a modest ruling gradient, the events of the Crimean War (when Brassey was called upon to support the British troops with a small army of ‘navigators’) required a drastic reappraisal of the extensive earthworks. The result was a switchback with gradients in the region of 1 in 100 near to Desborough, Kibworth and Sharnbrook, posing problems for locomotive departments until modern times.”^[23] In fact, if you look at the deposited plans you will find that Desborough is as planned and Sharnbrook is not as bad as was proposed! Charles Liddell had reported to the Leicester & Hitchin Construction Committee in a report dated 14th August 1852 that, “Slight modifications for improvement of Gradients and lessening the works may probably be advisable on the other parts of the Line, but there are none of any great importance.”^[24] And only the 1:120 banks of the Bedford & Hitchin section are steeper than the 1:132 originally planned. Williams is correct in what he says, Stretton^[25] really avoids the issue, and the later writers err.

Once a railway company was not merely established but had built and opened its line, its nature was conducive to the generation of records over and above those legally required. Even from the start it was necessary to control a dispersed empire – fifty miles between Derby and Rugby in the case of the Midland Counties, well over twice as much in the case of the London & Birmingham. Once the amalgamations began, very substantial systems could be involved. The London & North Western, as formed in 1846 by the second of the great amalgamations (the Midland, of course, coming first, in 1844), extended from London through Birmingham to Manchester and Liverpool. I do not need to remind anyone here of the extent of the Midland’s territory in 1922 with its interests in all four countries of the United Kingdom. Managing a service-industry spread out over a great area raised from the start issues of communication and control, really paralleled previously only in the armed forces, and generated huge quantities of paper records ranging all the way from the half-yearly reports to the proprietors right down to the simplest brief information-notice to every station on the line. These records were then retained for management, for staffing, for operations, for planning. As we have noted, some companies seemed never to want to dispose of anything. The Midland’s headquarters here in Derby remained for more than a century largely preserved from the major upheavals that can lead to the wholesale destruction of material. As a result, not only is there a particularly rich collection of records from the company in the public sector, but when finally rationalisation hit the Derby establishment there was much left that could be preserved from destruction by interested individuals. And because a railway company was a dispersed organisation, there was always material of certain classes to be found in many locations away from headquarters. This too aided the cause of preservation.

In one sense the organisation of the Midland and the nature of the records generated are typical of the larger companies, though each of those went its own way. A railway directorship was no sinecure. As a matter of policy the Midland Board was made up of representatives from the various areas served by the company. These men came together in Derby for a monthly meeting of the full Board, and they would also serve on one or two committees, the most important of which might meet fortnightly. The Midland was a large company, and like other large companies it developed early on quite an elaborate committee structure to manage its affairs. (A smaller company, such as the Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire, for example, could deal with much more directly at Board level.) Broadly, this structure was in place at the start of the 1850s and it saw the company through to Grouping with no major changes. The minutes of all the standing committees, as well as of various other committees – above all, the various construction committees – appointed to look after special tasks, were carefully kept. It is therefore possible to follow the broad decision-making processes of the company – especially where money was concerned – with few problems. The company also had to report to its shareholders, so we have the half-yearly reports (later, annual reports) with their really very detailed financial statements and reports of progress. Remember that twice a year shareholders could come together in Derby (by free ticket) to question the Board on its stewardship. The evidence is that significant numbers took the opportunity.

However, it is when we begin to look at the detail that we begin to find the gaps in information. There is a lot there: as I said, we have the records of various departments, and we have the minutes of a good many special committees tasked with overseeing particular construction jobs. Yet there are also significant gaps in comparison with some other companies. I said that we can follow the broad decision-making processes, and indeed we can. We can see how a topic was raised at a committee meeting – often by one of the senior officers though sometimes by other routes – discussed, remitted for further study, decided, and then passed across to another committee for comment or up to the board for final decision. What we generally do not see is the information on the basis of which the decisions were being taken. So, for example, it seems impossible to establish when and why the decision was taken to start an express passenger service over the Kettering–Nottingham–Trowell route – a line which had apparently always been seen as a loop line essentially for goods traffic. Or we know that at the time of the rebuilding of Leicester station there were two schemes under consideration, called “D” and “J” for reasons we can no longer trace, but we do not know the details and we do not know why it was “J” that was chosen.^[26] If we look to a company like the Great Northern, we find that the archive contains collections of the General Manager’s reports to the Board – the briefing papers on the basis of which decisions were taken. The detail offered is extensive. For instance, for that company’s Leicestershire lines we have information about the surveys, financial projections, meetings to gather support, meetings of officers of various companies, and so on.^[27] There is absolutely no reason to doubt that similar briefing papers were prepared by the Midland’s officers for its committees – indeed, a firm indication that I have seen that they were is a file on the Hazel Grove Curve which starts in 1908, only six years after the opening of the New Mills & Heaton Mersey line. This is an engineer’s file, and it deals with matters simply not recorded in the minute books at all. Regrettably, most such material seems not to survive and is certainly not in the public collections.

There are other gaps in the Midland record in comparison with other companies. We do not have extensive correspondence-files similar to those that have survived from the London & North Western. A smaller company like the Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire could actually copy the full text of important letters into the Board minutes. For a large company this was no real option; separate files were kept. The fact that very few such files survive for the Midland means that there is a major lacuna in our materials. And although the minutes of committees of directors have survived, those of the various officers’ committees, which would shew the everyday management decisions of the railway and the routine decisions on services, timetables, etc are no longer available to us save for the odd volume –  and what does survive appears to indicate that the scope of these records may never have been as extensive as that of similar records on, say, the London & North Western.^[28] So on the general side we have an excellent documentary record of the management of the railway, but on the detailed aspect there is considerable room for regret that more of the supporting documentation was not kept. We must wonder how, why, and when material disappeared. One possibility is that a good deal was lost only in very recent times, given that the Midland did such a good job in general of holding on to things.

It is when we move away from what I may call the formal records that we find what an exceptional heritage we have for the Midland Railway. There is quite probably a better record for the routine operation of the railway than for any other company. Although, as I have already said, the minutes for the officers’ committees and for the meetings of Midland officers with their counterparts in other companies are wholly or largely missing, the results of their deliberations are recorded in what may well be the best of all timetable collections for one of the pre-Grouping companies, in a remarkable series of weekly engineering notices, and in a range of other documents. These make it possible for us to relate the growth of the system, the expansion of the infrastructure, and the modernisation of the signalling on the Midland to the actual movement of trains on the railway in a way that is not possible for other companies for which the working documentation does not survive at all or survives in only a very limited degree. If we also bring in the information regarding traffic and expenses at stations, we can even relate the movement of trains on the railway to the movement of numbers of passengers and quantities of goods through stations (and in the case of the passengers, to the revenue obtained).

The run of “Working Time-Tables” is complete from what appears to be the first issue under that title in January 1854,^[29] the volumes of the collected issues for each year (up to 1869) or half-year (from 1870 to 1917 – after which a passenger/goods split was made, with a single volume for each in 1918 and then one passenger volume and two goods volumes from 1919). I myself know of only two volumes earlier than 1855. These are issues of what was called the “General Timetable”, issued in small format and in soft covers, that for September 1852 being private hands and that for October 1853 in the National Railway Museum’s collection. The working timetables are not just simple bound volumes but rather a full reference set, of which the later volumes have bound into them special notices, notices of special workings, of openings and closures, and so on. I know of no timetable collection so good for any other railway.^[30]

The timetable volumes include something else that I believe to be without parallel. From the issue for May 1856 the working timetables included certain operational information: lists of whistle-signals to be given approaching certain junctions, and details of up and down lines. As the years went by, more and more such material was included. In 1872 the Midland decided to bring this material together and issue it as a separate publication, the appendix to the working time tables. This first edition was of twenty-five pages only. We have the complete run of these appendices. All save the seventh edition, dated 1 June 1875, are bound into the appropriate timetable volumes at Kew. The seventh edition is lost from the Kew collection because it was bound at the end of a volume that has now lost its back, but a copy survives in private ownership. The scope of the appendix was increased over the first few issues. Thus, for example, the seventh edition introduced a list of those signalboxes that were not always open. Two years later the tenth edition (16 August 1877) extended this to a list of all signalboxes and provided space for the distances between them to be inserted. The following year this was duly done. The original format was retained until the June 1911 issue, after which there was a change to a more diagrammatic form. This was taken over by the London Midland & Scottish Railway for its first issues for the whole system, in 1931, and the LMS pattern was later extended to the whole of British Railways. (One of the pieces of information listed in the appendices is, not surprisingly, additional running lines. With regard to these, something I have been totally unable to discover from Midland records is any decision to introduce the term “slow lines” as a designation for additional passenger lines.)

Then there is the collection of public timetables. Here too there is a fine run, not as extensive as for the working books, but nevertheless continuous from 1878 and far better than for most other companies.^[31] The sequence actually begins with the volume for 1866, but the volumes for 1868, 1871-3, and 1875-7 are missing. (Kew also holds a number of issues for single months: December 1848, October 1853, July 1856, November 1864, and November 1876.) As with the working time tables, the main sequence is the company’s reference set which includes a large number of notices of various events. Interestingly, there is a short sequence of Midland public time tables in the British Library covering the period from 1865, which seems to be the year in which the large format was introduced, to 1882 and thus filling in the gaps in the Kew set for this period and taking us one further year back.^[32] That is the extent of the public collection, but there are a good many examples of the public books in private ownership – unlike the purely internal working books, the public books were meant to be as widely distributed as they could be, and so it is not surprising that a good few have survived, even from the earlier period. The problem for the researcher is, of course, trying to find out who has what (which is where the Railway & Canal Historical Society and the National Register of Archives can offer very useful help). A question from the timetables that I have so far been unable to answer falls in the “lean” years of the early 1860s. When did the line via Hitchin begin to be advertised as the main line?

In terms of importance the public time tables rank rather behind the working time tables, not only because the information they give is to be had from other sources, but also because they obviously do not contain anything relating to goods traffic. Especially in the earlier years railway timetables were printed in the local newspapers, often on a weekly basis. And there was always Bradshaw. Both these sources need to be used with caution, but they do give us essentially the same information as that to be had from the public time tables. With so much information about the passenger railway it might be thought that there would be no difficulty in establishing the details of when stations were opened and closed. But this is far from the case, and for a small but significant number of stations the information remains wholly elusive. There are two lines on the Midland that I have found especially problematical, Leeds to Bradford and Birmingham to Gloucester, as well as a whole list of individual stations for which neither timetables, newspapers, nor company records have helped me. It is also perhaps surprising that the newspapers and timetables, public and working, also do not help in discovering when through workings appeared on the scene – the first through coaches between Birmingham and Brecon, for example. Incidentally, the Midland archive includes one unusual and fascinating item relating to the passenger railway: the reports of the commission of enquiry into train delays that sat between 1891 and 1893 – something that could well be replicated today.^[33]

The record of the operation of the railway does not end with the timetables. Again unparalleled as far as I know is the collection of weekly engineering notices held in the National Railway Museum, from 1886 through to the late 1920s. This collection, clearly officially made and bound up by the Midland company itself, allows us to follow in full detail all the work on the infrastructure – the lines on which the trains ran, the signals that controlled them, and those parts of stations that impinged directly on the running of trains – over a forty-year period during which most of the major expansions of facilities took place. It is a pity that, as with the working timetables, these notices were printed on a thin and cheap paper as they were intended for a very brief life only. Unless they can be copied or conserved it seems inevitable that before too much longer the York authorities will have to start denying readers access to this material – and they are already in the position where they have to refuse to make photocopies because of the frailty of the originals. (Something that the Midland Railway Society could usefully do would be to help to raise money to preserve and make more widely available this apparently unique material.) An interesting adjunct to the information of when work was done in the weekly notices is provided by the run of engineer’s extra works books which give details of the costs of what was done.^[34]

Other records of the “action” side of the railway, as it were, relate directly to the infrastructure: most important and longest-running are probably the Distance Diagrams. All railway companies produced maps, of various sorts and for various purposes, and all railway companies maintained tables of distances. The information was needed not only for statistical returns but also – and much more importantly – for charging, since a distance tariff was in use. Companies kept their own tables and also supplied information to the Railway Clearing House. The Midland produced in 1873 a volume of Distance Diagrams, shewing all principal locations on the railway with their through distances from London St Pancras. The diagrams were kept up for fifty-five years. Gradually more and more detail was added, until a final form was reached in the early years of this century. A full new edition was issued in 1893, but the normal practice was to issue an annual amendment sheet with a requirement for all holders of the volumes to enter the changes into their books and to issue new editions of the several sheets as the total number of changes required. Like other of the Midland’s operating “aids”, the Distance Diagrams seem to have no parallel elsewhere. As you know, Peter Kay is now reprinting them,^[35] and in the last volume you will find a contribution from me which includes a full list of all the issues of all the sheets. Incidentally, all the books were numbered and the highest number we have seen is 104. Another Midland innovation (later extended to the whole of the LMS, like the Midland form of the appendix) was the production of the side-strip diagrams, shewing in stylised form the line of the railway with all tracks, crossovers, and sidings. There are other documents that, whilst of interest, are not so specifically Midland, like the map at Kew that shews the whole of the line with permanent speed restrictions^[36] or the volumes of gradient profiles of the line.^[37] There are also examples of the annual Tables of Lengths (though I cannot recall the existence of a copy of this in the Kew collection).

I want to mention two other examples of the recording side of things on the Midland. One is the quite remarkable collections of volumes “Traffic and Expenses at Stations”,^[38] giving us from 1872 to 1922 a picture of what was happening at all the company’s stations. Many of you will have seen these volumes which give for each year: the numbers for season ticket holders and for total passengers booked; receipts (i) from passengers, (ii) from parcels, horses, carriages, dogs, etc, (iii) total coaching receipts, and (iv) the goods debit; then, for livestock, minerals, and goods traffic, (i) the number of trucks of livestock in and out, (ii) tons of coal, coke, lime, and limestone in and out, (iii) tons carted in and out, (iv) tons not carted in and out, (v) tons mineral class in and out, and (vi) tons transhipped; and then finally the expenses of the station. Jack Simmons assures me that there is nothing similar for any other English railway – though this is information that students would dearly love to have. Indeed, the only comparable run is for the Glasgow & South Western. Yet we know it must have been collected for the other companies. In this context a work like Fisher’s Railway Accounts and Finance^[39] is invaluable in describing to us just what went on. And, of course, Williams and Stretton both have something to say on the subject in general terms as well. And then there is the volume we all know as the “Trains Office Diary”, a book of general information about the Midland – though principally concerned with the opening of new lines and stations and the bringing into use of additional running lines – that was kept up from year to year and forms a unique and invaluable record of events. It was long thought by most people that this book had been lost, but fortunately it does still exist, safe in private hands.

In addition to the record of the company’s own activities and the record of its relationship with the legislature, there is also the record of the Midland’s dealings with other companies, both railways and others (the Post Office, collieries, etc).^[40] There is nothing unique about this – all companies kept their signed agreements and copies of them very carefully indeed, for obvious reasons. Some are even annexed to acts of Parliament. One area where we appear to be particularly unfortunate with the Midland is with respect to running powers and working arrangements. Especially at a time when we have moved back to a large number of companies working passenger trains, running powers and working arrangements which shew how, in the last age of the private railway, companies managed (normally) to collaborate with one another for their mutual benefit can be interesting. And for most companies this information is readily available, collected into volumes which set out precisely the benefits and obligations together with the authority under which they are enjoyed (Act of Parliament, agreement, or whatever). Yet for the Midland we do not appear to have this material. It must have existed, and it seems incredible that in a company like the Midland which was otherwise very good at keeping records it should not have survived – but where is it?

An interesting difference in organisation that also leads to a difference in surviving records comes from the fact that whereas the London & North Western Railway, having assessed carefully the relative costs, very early appointed an in-house solicitor,^[41] the Midland never moved in this direction. The Birmingham firm of Beale, Marigold & Beale, which had been involved with the company from its very earliest days acted for the Midland throughout its history, with the consequence that a significant portion of the company’s legal record is in fact the record of this private firm. The railway connection carried on well beyond Midland days : when solicitors were at last allowed to advertise, Beales were duly to be found advertising their services in Railnews, drawing attention to their century-and-a-half connection with the railways. On the company side, of course, a very large portion of the record of a legal department concerns land, and in the Midland’s case this was looked after by the Estate Office under the Estate Agent. Much of the material here is still very much in use and therefore remains with the railway, destined for Railtrack’s new record depository in Gillingham.

I have not mentioned personal records so far. The railway was a labour-intensive industry and there are substantial holdings of staff records at Kew, though nothing like a complete collection. The Midland is actually quite well represented. There are records for some departments for quite long periods — those of the Locomotive Department begin in 1859 and of the Mineral Office in 1860. A “staff register” covers 1868 to 1902, and there books of new appointments deal with the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Especially interesting is a six-volume collection of books of personal-accident registers covering the period from 1875 to 1921.^[42] There are also staff records beginning in the 1870s and running through to about 1910 for quite a significant proportion of the company’s major stations. A very different sort of personal record deals with the shareholders. Huge companies had a very large number of private investors and their records make up an enormous amount of paper. Much of this material is of very specialist interest indeed and I suspect its worth to most of us is nothing like in proportion to its enormous extent. Disposal of shareholders’ records for various parts of the railway industry is a topical issue.

I hope that I have touched on enough of the range of materials to be found in the record of the railways – and in particular in the archive relating to the Midland Railway – to back up my contention that we do here have an industrial archive of unparalleled wealth and significance. Part by chance, part by design, this archive has been preserved for us and made available to us. I started by saying that the Midland Railway has not ended, even though the Midland Railway Company may have been dissolved nearly sixty-five years ago. And the railway industry is certainly not in its death-throes. It is now up to us to make sure that we continue to add all significant materials to the railway archive so that those who come after us will have the same sort of seamless record of the industry that we have – and enjoy using. There will have to be selectivity, and in some areas things will be very different from what they were. The Midland Railway maintained its infrastructure and built its rolling-stock. Infrastructure work is now contracted out to major civil engineering firms (as it has long since been in some other countries) and rolling-stock is built by international firms like Adtranz here in Derby operating out of the old Midland premises. To what extent are the records of firms like these still railway records? To what extent do we with our interests in the railway archive want to delve into the records of the National Express Group or the Virgin Group, let alone those of the Compagnie Générale des Eaux? How important is it to ensure that the railway records of a franchisee who might be in the industry for no more than seven years are kept? Parliament has given the Railway Heritage Committee the necessary powers (though not the necessary money) and it is now up to those of us on the committee, in consultation with the creators of records, their keepers, and their users to decide what sort of a record of the railway is to continue. We owe it to our successors to make it a good one.

[1] The Railways Act 1993, 1993 cap. 43, 5 November 1993.

[2] The Railway Heritage Act 1996, 1996 cap. 42, 18 July 1996.

[3] Jack Simmons, in a paper entitled “This Junk” given to a seminar on railway records held at the Public Record office on 25 April 1997 under the auspices of the Railway Heritage Committee. The reference is PRO RAIL 527/1255.

[4] R Carrington Willis, My fifty-one years at Euston, Bell, London 1939, pp 126-7. The parliamentary notice for the Bill was published as usual in the London Gazette, 20 November 1925, and was reproduced from this in the Railway Gazette, 27 November 1925, page 723. The aim of the clause in question was: “To relieve the Company from obligations to keep registers transfers of stock and records thereof ; to make provision with regard to the registration of stocks held jointly and for the acceptance by the Company of receipts for interest upon debenture stock held jointly.”

[5] The Public Record Office was established by The Public Record Office Act, 1-2 Victoria cap. 94, 1838. Further Acts under the same name were 40-41 Victoria cap. 55, 1877, and 61-2 Victoria cap. 12, 1898. The PRO currently operates under The Public Records Act, 6-7 Elizabeth II cap. 51, 23 July 1958, which repealed the earlier Acts.  The Act which created the National Coal Board and made provision for the records of the coal industry to be treated as public records was The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act, 9-10 George VI cap. 59, 1946.

[6] The Transport Act, 10-11 Elizabeth II cap. 46.

[7] The Transport Act 1968, 1968 cap. 73.

[8] Photocopied text on an article entitled “Railway History in Acts of Parliament” provided by Charles Clinker to the author.

[9] 31 George II cap. xxii, 9 June 1758.

[10] Bigg’s General Railway Acts (A Collection of the Public General Acts, Relating to Railways : including the Companies, Lands, and Railways Clauses Consolidation Acts, complete. 1830-1911), sixteenth edition, Waterlow & Sons, London, 1912.

[11] Herapath’s Journal, 11 October 1851 page 1097, printed the following “tribute”: “Obituary—The Late Railway Commissioners : Yesterday died, by Act of Parliament, the Board of Railway Commissioners, to the great grief of the lovers of folly in the railway world. The honourable board had long been declining in public opinion from its members being unsuited to their functions, and too weak to support its great ponderosity of folly. To that affliction is to be attributed the mental vagaries and aberrations of which the board has been guilty. No one imagines but that utility was intended at its birth; but, unluckily, railway interest and patronage were at war at the time, and refused to take common sense into their councils. The result was a railway monstrum horrendi, just fit to scare a few railway crows, and to be annoying and ridiculous to birds of better feather, But as it is now dead charity forbids us to say more of it than that we hope we may never see its like again.”

[12] In the early days these reports, together with all correspondence, were of course published in the parliamentary papers. The years 1841 to 1858 are thus covered.

[13] PRO RAIL 491/712-737 – these files cover the period from 1855 to 1922 with the exception of 1897 to 1902 (for which years the files are missing).

[14] The first of these appeared in 1872 as Return (Pursuant to an Order of the House of Lords, dated 6th May 1872,) of Railways in the United Kingdom showing those which are worked by Telegraph Block Systems, ordered to be printed 8th August 1872.

[15] PRO RAIL 467

[16] PRO RAIL 359

[17] The Midland records are PRO RAIL 491, those of the Midland Counties Railway PRO RAIL 490, of the North Midland Railway PRO RAIL 530, and of the Birmingham & Derby Junction Railway PRO RAIL 36.

[18] F S Williams, Our Iron Roads: their history, construction and social influences, pp x + 390, Bemrose, Derby & London, 1852. A second, greatly expanded, edition (pp xvi + 514) appeared in 1883 and was followed by third and fourth editions in the same year, a fifth edition in 1884, a sixth in 1885, and a seventh in 1888 – all being more reprints than new editions in the modern sense. The second edition was reprinted in two volumes by Gresham Books, Woking, 1981.

[19] F S Williams, The Midland Railway, its rise and progress: a narrative of modern enterprise, pp xii + 700, Bemrose, Derby & London, 1876. A second edition, which was a re-issue with four pages of press notices appended, appeared in either 1876 or 1877. This was followed by a third edition (pp xvi + 681) in 1877, a fourth (pp xvi + 687) in 1878, and a fifth (pp xvi + 510) in 1888.

[20] Derby Railway History Research Group, The Midland Counties Railway, Railway and Canal Historical Society, Mold 1989.

[21] Williams, Midland Railway, 3^rd edition, pp 375-6.

[22] E G Barnes, The Rise of the Midland Railway 1844-1874, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1966, pp 147-8. This is the first volume of a two-volume history of the company. The second volume, entitled The Midland Main Line 1875-1922, was published in 1969.

[23] Roy Williams, The Midland Railway : a new history, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1988, p 73.

[24] PRO RAIL 491/299, meeting of 18 August 1852

[25] Clement E Stretton, The History of the Midland Railway, pp xii + 360 + 48 (advertisements), Methuen & Co, London, 1901, pp 155-7. (Laurence Knighton, in the Midland Railway Society Journal, issue No. 5, July 1997, draws attention to a report in the Derby Mercury in 1901 of an action against Stretton brought by one John Thompson Stephen, a Leicester journalist, who claimed that he – not Stretton – had actually done nearly all the writing.)

[26] PRO RAIL 491/157 minute 26105

[27] PRO RAIL 236/310 and 236/311

[28] Thus,  for example, PRO RAIL 491/262 is Book No. 2 of the Officers’ Committee minutes and this one volume covers no less than a eight-year period (1856-1864). Or PRO RAIL 491/355 covers, again in one volume, meetings of the General Managers and Officers of the Midland and Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire companies for thirty-three years from 1861 to 1894.

[29] PRO RAIL 963 contains the volumes for 1855 to 1860 and from 1862 onwards, the 1854 volume is in private ownership, and the 1861 volume is in the Derby Industrial Museum.

[30] To the best of my knowledge, only the timetable collection for the Great Western Railway (amongst the principal companies) approaches the quality of that for the Midland. For the Great Western the working time-tables begin in 1862 with an incomplete year and are then complete from 1863 to Grouping and beyond. The first public time-tables are those for 1856-7 and the collection is patchy to the turn of the century, complete from then on.

[31] PRO RAIL 962

[32] British Library, Periodical Publications, Derby, Midland Railway Time Tables, January 1865 to November 1882, P.P.2500.n.c.

[33] PRO RAIL 491/740

[34] PRO RAIL 491/1107-1136

[35] Midland Railway System Maps (The Distance Diagrams), volume 3 (diagrams 28 to 45) and volume 4 (diagrams 26, 27, 46 to 65), Peter Kay, Teignmouth 1997. Volume 4 is forthcoming. Volume 1 is taken as being The Midland’s Settle & Carlisle Distance Diagrams, published by the Cumbrian Railways Association 1992 and including diagrams 1g, 2 to 8, and 9a as well as a table of distances and gradient profiles.

[36] PRO RAIL 491/827

[37] PRO RAIL 491/709 (desk volume 1902), 710 (pocket volume 1902), 830 (1882)

[38] PRO RAIL 491/672-7 (Pieces 672 and 673 are duplicates – the volumes cover twelve years each.)

[39] J Alfred Fisher, Railway Accounts and Finance: an Exposition of the Principles and Practice of Railway Accounting in all its Branches, fourth edition, pp xl + 588, George Allen & Co., London, 1912.

[40] There are several sets of these agreements in the Public Record Office collection, in the RAIL 491 class.

[41] RAIL PRO 410/845 contains the agreement between the London & North Western Railway and Mr J Blenkinsop concerning the setting up and staffing of a Legal Department as from 1 January 1862. A staff-list and salary-list are included.

[42] PRO RAIL 491/1058-1062 Register of Accidents to Company’s servants and others not in Company’s service (six volumes)