Celebrating Railway200 in 2025

Update for April

To celebrate Railway 200, the Midland Railway Study Centre will be holding two Railway 200 Open Weekends and we will be in the thick of The Greatest Gathering...

Please feel free to repost this Jpeg file on social media!

Attending organisations include: Midland Railway – Butterley, Peak Rail, Wingfield Station, the Great Northern Railway Society, the Midland & Great Northern Railway Circle, the Historical Model Railway Society and the daughter of the late Ted Hancock will there to sell copies of his much anticpated Volume Two of the History of the Dore & Chinley line.

The link to obtain the FREE tickets required in order to manage the relatively limited physical capacity of the Study Centre will go live very soon.

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The Greatest Gathering at Alstom's Derby Litchurch Lane Site

You cannot have failed to have already heard about the Greatest Gathering thanks to the very well publicised launch event in February?

Given the fundamental purpose of the event is to celebrate the history of our railways, the Midland Railway Society, Derby Museums and many other similar organisations such as our line society friends, heritage railways and others are teaming up to help tell that story in the History, Heritage and Preservation Zone.

There is a lot of planning and arranging still to do and further details will appear here soon. Meanwhile, here is a flavour of the work we are doing to help visitors to the Greatest Gathering understand how the site they will see in 2025 relates to the Midland Railway's Carriage & Works of 1876.

If you are one of the 10,000 tickets holders for each day, we will be seeing you there. It's going to be an exciting year of celebration. Please click the Railway200 logo below for more details about what's planned elsewhere.

A reminder of what Railway 200 is all about

Led by the Great British Railways Transition Team on behalf of the railway industry and heritage partners around the country, this will take the form of a wide variety of events and we will be doing our bit to mark this milestone. The Midland Railway Society in partnership with the Museum of Making will be taking part in this national celebration marking two hundred years of railways as we know them.

Railways came to Derby in 1839, but of course a constituent company of the Midland Railway — the Leicester & Swannington Railway — dates from 1832. Other Midland Railway constituents — the Ticknall Tramway and the Mansfield & Pinxton Railway — respectively trace their heritage back as far as 1802 and 1817, even earlier than the Stockton & Darlington. Never part of the Midland Railway but local to Derby, the Little Eaton Gangroad beats them all, opening in 1795. The honour of being the first “modern railway” falls to the Stockton & Darlington Railway, however, as when it opened on 27th September 1825, it was operated with steam locomotives rather than horse power.

A Special Piece of Derbyshire Railway History

At the Midland Railway Study Centre we are incredibly fortunate in that really kind people contact us and offer us documents or objects that they think will be suited to our collection and that we can give them the proverbial “good home”. Frequently this is tinged with great sadness as what is being offered belonged to a recently deceased loved-one — often a former railwayman. Unfortunately, serious space constraints, coupled with a necessarily well-defined Collection Development Policy, mean that we all too frequently have to regretfully decline the offer. Every so often, however, we are approached with the offer of an item so historically important that we feel so incredibly honoured to have been chosen to take it in.

Thursday, 13 March 2025 was one of those days when we received such an item. It takes the form of a 34" x 24½" (864mm x 622mm) solidly constructed picture frame displaying a pair of 163 year old architectural drawings mounted back-to-back (i.e. with glass both front and rear).

The drawings both date from about 1862 and relate to the famous twin-facade of the adjacent London & North Western and Midland Railway stations at Buxton. Formed of ornate fan-arch windows, only the LNWR side survives today with the Midland station being closed in March 1967 and subsequently demolished to make way for the town's inner relief road.

How these two competing companies came to cooperate in building this delightful piece of architecture, and the personalities behind it, makes for a fascinating story... which you can read over on the Midland Railway Society's website.

The survival of these drawings is thanks to a now sadly deceased Buxton resident. How he came by them perhaps a century or so after their creation, is unfortunately lost to history. What we do know is that they are now back in Derbyshire and are available to users of the Midland Railway Study Centre — including people like you who visit our website:-

Please note that by downloading these files, as with any other download from the Midland Railway Study Centre website, you agree to abide by these modest Terms and Conditions.

Do you come here often?

If you do, you are obviously interested in some aspect of the Midland Railway and are getting some benefit from what we have to offer here — or so we sincerely hope! None of this would be possible without the Midland Railway Society and the Midland Railway Society cannot survive without members ...who are people just like you. As well as supporting the Midland Railway Study Centre (and gaining access to some really useful exclusive resources for MRS Members), membership connects you with a wide ranging community of knowledgable, friendly and helpful like-minded souls. All for the incredibly reasonable annual subscription of £20. This also includes; the Journal (three per year), Newsletter (quarterly) and now our newly introduced twice-yearly publication Modelling The Midland. Then there are the informative and convivial meetings, visits to places of historical Midland Railway interest and access to our well stocked bookstall.

With all that, what are you waiting for?
You can either: Download a membership form and send it back to us.
Or visit the Midland Railway Society's Shop to do it all online. It really is easy.

Not just the Midland Railway

Midland Railway Society members will be well aware that Study Centre Volunteer (and much else!) Steve Huson writes a column in each issue of our Newsletter describing some of the recent acquisitions to the Collection — and indeed, Members of the Society can download a full list of each update to the Catalogue from the Members' Area to inform themselves of additions. However, there is a recent acquisition that it worth highlighting which is likely to be outside Steve's sphere as it is not Midland Railway... though as you will see, it does cover a Midland location.

This is a two-chains-to-the-inch land plan of the Wetmore area of Burton-on-Trent created by the North Staffordshire Railway. Anyone who knows even a little about Burton's railways will appreciate the wealth of history that this plan represents. As well as four pre-grouping companies (the Midland, North Staffordshire, London & North Western, and Great Northern Railways), several of the Burton brewery companies had running powers in the town for their own locomotives. This would have made the area covered by this plan an incredibly busy and fascinating piece of railway. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges represented by this plan would be to identify the few surviving buildings within its core area today (there are actually two significant ones!).

This beautifully colour washed plan is undated but based on its content has to be later than 1887 but earlier than 1910. It has survived in use by the British Rail Property Board until the 1950s. The Midland Railway created their own two chains to the inch land plan of this area (which can be downloaded here for comparison), as did the Great Northern Railway. In the latter case, this is part of a set of plans for their “Derbyshire Extension” which are held by the National Archives under their reference RAIL236/1017. Having compared the two, it is inescapable that the NSR version is identical to that of the Great Northern's except for the 'branding' in the top right corner — which will undoubtedly make for an interesting story.

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity...?

From the Derby Mercury of 6th February 1867, page 8

Wingfield Station

The Study Centre Coordinator and the Midland Railway Society's Outreach Officer, Steve Huson, visited Wingfield station at the end of October. The specific purpose of the meeting will have to remain under wraps for now pending an exciting announcement which “Wingfield Station 1947” will be making in the coming months. However, it was an opportunity to see how much the station has progressed since we attended the celebration event for the completion of the magnificent restoration work a year ago and we were hugely impressed. The team of volunteers there have created a community charity to provide year-round public access to the site, opening to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (soon to be extended to Wednesdays and Thursdays as well). Indeed, the evening prior to our meeting, the building had hosted an event for the local Rotary Club which was described as “packed out” ... the absolute epitome of breathing new life into the (almost) 185 year old building. All a far cry from its low ebb of decrepitude only a few years ago. We came away full of enthusiasm for the specific project and ways in which the Midland Railway Society, Wingfield Station 1947 and Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust all continue to work together in support of our common aims.

Midland Railway Estates Collection

Major New Release Online

An extract from Estates Plan ref: 88-1997-5_147.5 “Millers Dale Temporary Arrangement to be Brought Into Use” from July 1905, one of several plans relating to the widening and provision of the second viaduct there in 1905.

This is really exciting news and I hardly know where to begin... A hugely significant collection within the overall holdings of the Midland Railway Study Centre are the Estate Plans. Developed by the Midland Railway from the 1880s in their own “off-site store” at Ambergate, then added-to over the years by the LMS and British Railways, this treasure trove found its way to Derby Museums in the 1970s. Since then the collection has been conserved and catalogued but has only been available to in-person visitors to the MRSC, and even then only by ploughing through the paper-based catalogue.

Therefore it has been a long-held ambition of ours to make this collection fully available in digital form through the web site. Work to scan the plans and digitise the catalogue entries for the collection has been going on behind the scenes for several years now (and a really big thank you to our volunteer, Tony, for all his hard work toward that objective).

Although there's still a lot of work to do, we estimate we are about two-thirds of the way though and so the time is right to release that first tranche of plans — which amounts to over 850 individual items — for visitors to the Midland Railway Study Centre web site to search, view and freely download.

The new records have been incorporated into our online catalogue and will show up in standard search results. You can also filter your results by selecting “Plan (Estates)” in the 'Categories' drop-down list. A link to download the high resolution file will appear in the results. If any of the links or thumbnails fail to load, or you encounter any other issues in searching or using the catalogue, please don't hesitate to let us know via the link below. In fact, any feedback at all will be welcome.

As with all our Midland Railway era downloads, you are free to do with these plans what you wish provided you don't make a charge for reuse. Also, please credit us appropriately if you redistribute any of them to help others find our collection. We hope this will significantly add to the breadth of results researchers find here, particularly in respect of geographic subjects.

Work continues to scan and catalogue the remainder of the collection and we hope to have a further batch uploaded within a few months. The end of this project is in sight.

If you find these, or any of the resources we provide on this web site useful, then please consider making a donation to top up our conservation fund. There's a PayPal donate button on several of our pages, like this one.

The Original Sheffield Station Layout

As a precursor to the important announcement regarding our extensive collection of Midland Railway Estate Plans, here is an extract from one of them. This plan illustrates how Sheffield station was laid-out from when it was opened on 1st February 1870 until the newly enlarged station as we know it today opened on 10th September 1893. (Open the image in a new tab or window to see more detail.)

We are delighted to make our collection of Midland Railway two-chains-to-the-inch land plans downloadable directly from the site. This treasure-trove of information is made available free-of-charge, subject only to a non-commercial usage Creative Commons Licence as detailed on the linked-page, where you will also find an explanation of their historical context.

The Midland Railway Two Chains to the Inch Land Plans

We are extremely grateful to the Chaddesden History Group, and Peter Cholerton in particular, for sharing a couple of their research papers relating to an often-overlooked corner of Derby's railway history — Chaddesden Sidings. So much so, we have created a page dedicated to the subject. As well as Peter's papers there are links to some of our own resources including the Midland Railway's detailed land plans of the sidings and surrounding area.

This view of Chaddesden South Junction signal box was captured by the late Pat Larkam as part of his extensive research into Midland Railway signalling in support of Derby Museums' famous 7mm model railway — the running of which can be enjoyed as part of the Museum of Making at 11:00 and 14:00 each day.
This Midland Railway “Type 4b” signal box replaced an earlier structure from 24th March 1907 and measured 32'x11"6'x12'. It survived the introduction of Power Signalling in the Derby area from 4th May 1969, but not the eventual closure of Chaddesden Sidings as a marshalling yard and was abolished on 17th July 1977.
Standing on this spot today would be looking straight into the Boots store on the Wyvern Retail Park.

THE SIR HENRY FOWLER COLLECTION

We are delighted to have acquired a substantial collection of photographs, papers and other ephemera relating to the life, work and times of Sir Henry Fowler, the Midland Railway's last Locomotive Superintendent (then styled “Chief Mechanical Engineer”). Now all sorted and fully catalogued, it is available for reference and here we present some of the highlights of the collection for you to enjoy...

“Fills one with amazement...”

Many thousands of articles of the most varied description find their way to the Midland Railway Company's depot at the City Road Wharf, Derby, either as lost, unclaimed, damaged, or salvage property and a glance through the catalogue of the three days sale by the Derby auctioneers, Messrs. J. and W. Heathcote, at their mart, fills one with amazement, for the stock would do credit to any "Universal Provider". The disposal of the goods commenced on Tuesday, and the following list will give an idea of the variety of articles which are to be obtained: Calico, curtains, towels, cutlery, dustbins, stall, timber, nails, screws, rivets, bolts, sauce, Quaker Oats, ironmongery, hardware, waste, flocks, trunks, dress baskets, bags, furniture, linoleum, oilcloth, carpets, rugs, crockery, ornaments, an electric dynamo, yarn, woollen cloths, baths, galvanised, cisterns, tanks, bicycles and accessories, and numerous other items. At Thursday's sale there were offered for auction no fewer than ninety lots of umbrellas in dozens and two dozens, twenty lots of twelve walking sticks each, and seventeen lots of two dozen walking sticks. There were also sixteen lots of six gents' overcoats and any number of mackintoshes, capes &c. An interesting lot was a mahogany four-post bedstead upon which the late Queen Victoria slept at the Midland Hotel, Derby, on the occasion of her visit, on 28th September, 1849. It may be added that Queen Victoria's bedstead caused some spirited bidding, and was eventually knocked down to a buyer who tendered as his name and address, “J- B-, Model Lodging House”.

— The Railway News. May 7th, 1910.

WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

“The total number of employees of the Midland Railway Company who went out to take their part in the great fight against aggression was twenty-two thousand nine hundred and forty-one. Of this number, two thousand eight hundred and thirty-three made the supreme sacrifice, and those of us who are living under the freedom purchased at the cost of these lives cannot allow the memory of their devotion to die.”

— Frank Tatlow, General Manager of the Midland Railway
in his letter to the families of those listed on the Company War Memorial.
November 1921.

Wellingborough Accident of 1898

For no other reason than we had occasion to scan this document recently and thought it deserved sharing, here is the detailed plan that accompanied the report by Board of Trade inspector, Lt. Col. Yorke, into the terrible accident at Wellingborough on 2nd October 1898. The original is in our collection, but we're happy to plug the fantastic The Railways Archive website as a source of the report if you wish to read it.

Very briefly, a heavy barrow somehow ran off the platform into the path of an oncoming Down Express. Despite a heroic attempt to move it off the line, the engine of the Express was derailed on contact with the barrow, resulting in the loss of seven lives including both men on the footplate of the Express. The tragedy led to a change in the way station platforms are configured which remains the case today.

Ref: RFB01380

Midland Railway System Map

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

Researching Your Local Railway Station

Looking for a new project?

We are commonly asked how someone might begin to find out more about their local railway station - whether for personal interest or as part of more structured research. This led to the creation of our Researching Your Local Railway Station page, with some suggestions about what points might be addressed and where to turn for answers. The list is far from exhaustive and some suggestions may not apply to all stations (it doesn't actually have to be your "local" station of course!). If nothing else we hope it inspires and we look forward to helping you.

The Midland Railway Assemblage Trails

Everything in The Assemblage of the Museum of Making has a story to tell. Some objects perhaps have more to say than others and so we have developed these self-guided trails to help you discover more about some of what we consider to be the most interesting Midland Railway objects.

Needless to say, you don't actually have to be at the Museum of Making to enjoy them, but we do think the best way to appreciate what you're looking at is to visit in person, so we have tried to make these trails smartphone friendly.

There are currently two trails; one intended to be a little more light hearted and may be more suited to family groups. The other is pitched more toward those who might be looking for something a little deeper.

Are you researching a Midland Railway related subject?

Are you looking for an outlet for your work? The Midland Railway Society's Journal is always on the lookout for new material and would be delighted to publish your work. You don't have to be a Midland Railway Society member (though we'd like it if you became one!)

Of course there is always that feeling that "it's not quite finished" or otherwise not ready for public show. That's a natural worry, and even if it is true, think of the benefits of publishing an excerpt of your work or showcasing a particular aspect of your research. The benefit of exposure to a wide audience of knowledgeable Midland Railway Society members can be very significant in terms of new information or material you receive by way of feedback. That said, it is important not to feel intimidated — MRS members are without fail a friendly bunch!

If you have anything which you would like us to consider for publication in the Journal, please contact the Study Centre Coordinator at the details at the bottom of the page.

Extracted from Appendix No. 20 of 1899 — a list of Up and Down lines of the Midland Railway.

The Midland Railway was about much more than trains

This drawing was prepared by the Midland Railway's Carriage & Wagon Department just before the First World War to illustrate the myriad types of hand-drawn barrows and trollies they were manufacturing. The uses to which these vehicles were put were many & varied, perfectly illustrating the wide variety of functions which a railway company undertook.

Clicking the above image will download a 4.2Mb scanned Jpeg of the drawing which we hope you will find fascinating. It is one of more than 1,200 items which can now be downloaded from our on-line catalogue. If you haven't looked at it lately, we hope you will find the catalogue worthwhile browsing and that you'll find plenty of interest.

Older News...

To try and keep the Home Page reasonably under control, the older stories and features get moved to our Older News page. Here you'll find details of activities and stories from the recent (and not so recent) past, including old updates on the Silk Mill's transformation into the Museum of Making.