To see which parts of the country were served by the Midland Railway, please click this thumbnail to view a system map from 1914.

What places did the Midland Railway serve? While obviously not infinite, that's still a long list. Based on enquiries we have received and material we have digitised, here is a list. Is your home community or area of interest listed here? If not, that certainly doesn't mean we don't have anything about there — it just means nothing has been digitised yet, so the next stage is a catalogue search.

What area did the Midland Railway cover?It could be said that the clue is in the name, and indeed, we are often incorrectly referred to as the Midlands Railway Study Centre, but it is handy to think of the Midland Railway spreading its tentacles outwards across the United Kingdom from the centre (if you can accept Derby as the centre of the world 😏). Ah! you say, what's this about the “United Kingdom ” — The Midland didn't go to Scotland. I counter by pointing out that although the Midland Railway had no lines of their own north of Carlisle (digressing a moment to point out the fact that Willowholme Junction with the Caledonian Railway at 309 miles 19 chains from the buffer stops at St. Pancras was the furthest point north on the Midland Railway), it had a joint arrangement with the Glasgow & South Western for its Anglo-Scottish expresses, and the cultivation of Scotish traffic was so important to the Midland that it was a quarter-shareholder in the Forth Bridge.

That brings me to another digression, and indeed a particularly useful resource on the Midland Railway Society's site — a very helpful article written by John Gough that explains how the Midland Railway's distinctive system of mile posts came about and how the mileage is calculated.

Having mentioned Scotland, it is a logical next step to talk about the Midland Railway and its holdings/interests in the North of Ireland. The Belfast & Northern Counties Committee and the County Donegal Railways Joint Committee were wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Midland from 1903, though in general terms, management of these concerns was administered locally with only minimal interference from Derby. The B&NCC had itself purchased the Portstewart Tramway and several other “small” lines in the area prior to the Midland's involvement. Investment in the three-foot-gauge County Donegal line followed in 1906. Unfortunately for modern day historians, the bulk of the records relating to the Northern Counties Committee were lost due to enemy action destroying their former headquarters at Belfast's York Road station in the Second World War. The Midland Railway Study Centre holds a modest quantity of artefacts and paperwork, but the preeminent source for research on all lines over the Irish Sea is the Irish Railway Record Society, who have a very active branch based in Manchester, whom we are proud to have an informal relationship with.

More generally, this page is supposed to be outlining research resources available in the Midland Railway Study Centre under the general banner of “Places”. There is no better starting point in that respect than the Midland Railway's incomparable Distance Diagrams. These are just one of a series of innovations introduced by the Company's Land Agent from 1888 to 1913 (alternatively known within that time as the Estate Agent), Peter Service McCallum. Another of his masterworks already mentioned above was the re-mileposting of the network and perhaps the greatest was the creation of the Two Chains to the Inch Land Plans that will be mentioned later.. The Distance Diagrams in physical form are huge and heavy (16" x 21" x 4" — or 406mm x 533mm x 102mm)but as with so many large documents in our collection, we are fortunately to have been able to have digitised them. Have a look at the page dedicated to the Distance Diagrams for more information about them. If you are a Midland Railway Society member and have logged-in you can download all the Sheets, index and amendment pages as a perk of membership. Of course they are accessible to non-members, all you have to is make a request accordingly.

While the Distance Diagrams provide a very detailed overview of the railways of any given district, the Two Chain plans provide intricate detail of the railway, its buildings and surrounding topography. For the uninitiated, a Chain is an ancient unit of measurement favoured by Victorian surveyors through the simple expedient of an operative at each end of a literal chain 66 feet (20.12m) long effectively leap-frogging one another and counting! (By no coincidence at all, the wickets in cricket are 22 yds or one chain apart). These plans, therefore are at a scale of 1:3960. Over the first decade of the 20th century, McCallum and his team set about compiling a detailed survey of every square inch of Midland Railway property, producing bound volumes of these Two Chain plans; each 33in x 21½in (838mm x 546mm) sheet covers ¾mile of route. Multiple copies of these plans were produced and used for multiple purposes. Copies of those which passed to the British Railways Property Board remained in use until the 1980s and these very well-thumbed copies detail the progressive sale of disused railway land over the years. Our coverage — through the collections of Roy F Burrows and Derby Museums — are extensive but not, unfortunately, complete. Perhaps not-unsurprisingly, the busier and more important that a former Midland Railway line is today, the more likely that we have a gap there. Notable absences include sections of the main London line and the so-called “West Branch” between Derby and Bristol — unfortunately.

There's another great resource to get started with discovering “places” on the Midland Railway and that is the annually issued Accountant's List of Stations. These lists have significant benefit in that they provide a uniform structure for enumerating the stations, broken down geographically (a much harder feat than you may imagine) and that they include the surname of the incumbent station master. This latter detail turns out to be slightly less helpful than it immediately seems — just having a surname can be less-than-helpful, especially if it's Mr. Smith! Even so, here are the years that we hold and each one is just waiting for you to donwload...

This has just been a “taster” to give you an idea of the sort of resources available from the Midland Railway Study Centre. The emphasis here has been on what's available online, but the inevitable truth is there will always be much more that exists in physical form which can't be digitised. Put another way; we would be delighted to see YOU at the Midland Railway Study Centre.

There is more content like this to come...