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By David Geldard and Roy Burrows on

New Resource – Midland Railway Timetable Finding Aid

A useful new resource will help anyone interested in the history of the Midland Railway.

Working under the ‘Partners in Excellence’ scheme with the National Railway Museum, Midland Railway Society members David Geldard and Roy Burrows have been working on a document that will help researchers locate public and working timetables of the Midland Railway and its constituent companies.

Midland Railway Public Timetable 1908 (TIME/MR/P/00030)

There are three main repositories where such documents are kept and are publicly available:

The National Railway Museum

The National Archives

The Midland Railway Study Centre at the Silk Mill Museum in Derby

 

A physical check has been made of the actual documents held by all three organisations and from this work a series of nine listings has been compiled providing the following coverage:

P1: Midland Railway Public Timetables (all-line)
P2: Midland Railway Public Timetables (limited coverage)
W1: Midland Railway Working Timetables (all-line)
W2: Midland Railway Working Timetables (limited coverage)
P3: London, Tilbury & Southend Railway Public Timetables
W3: London, Tilbury & Southend Railway Working Timetables
C1: Mainland Midland Railway Constituent Company Timetables (excluding L.T.& S.R.)
P4: Midland Railway in Ireland Public Timetables
W4: Midland Railway in Ireland Working Timetables

Midland Railway public timetable 1920 (TIME/MR/P/00049)

Except for listing C1, which is alphabetical by company, each lists the relevant timetables chronologically under the year and month in which validity commenced. In itself this provides a useful (although, of necessity, incomplete) record of the intervals at which each form of timetable was issued. For all listings, each entry provides the necessary reference for document ordering at the respective repository – for the MRSC the Item Number, for the National Railway Museum the ID Number and for TNA the full Piece Number for their catalogue ‘Discovery’.

Each listing is supplemented by notes as thought necessary and the Finding Aid includes an introduction that fully explains the basis on which the document has been prepared.

The finished work has been formatted as a PDF by MRS member Mervyn Bryce and it can now be freely downloaded from the Study Centre website.

It is intended that the work will be updated as additions are made to the three collections and all those involved hope that it will prove a useful tool for guiding researchers to those timetables which they may wish to study.

Midland Railway public timetable 1895 (TIME/MR/P/00020)

Midland Railway public timetable 1895 (ref TIME/MR/P/00020)

Search the full National Railway Museum timetable list.

2 comments on “New Resource – Midland Railway Timetable Finding Aid

  1. Each time I try to go to the Study Centre website, my security software (Norton) blocks access, saying it is a known dangerous web page. This has been going on for a few months. Are you already aware of this?

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