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Midland Railway Company


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And long lived, didn't some Kirtley outside framed locos last into BR days?

 

Whether they are look as good as a North Eastern F or G class is another matter...

Yes at least one Kirtley double framed 0-6-0 survived into BR days IIRC it was 58110 but don't take that as gospel.  A friend of mine remembers seeing it in use as a pilot at Derby where it's lever reverse was much appreciated  by the crew as it made shuting so easy.

 

Jamie

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Interestingly started life as 778 in March 1870 got a 160 psi boiler in February 1903, 18 in. cylinders in 1924 but never got a round top or Belpaire boiler and finished life with Salter Valve gear. Withdrawn in November 1951.

Was it going to be preserved? I don't know but someone might.

No's:778,2630,22630,58110.

Tony 

Edited by technohand
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Technohead - The comfort was brilliant in the Diner, because it was LNWR not Midland .... :no: 

Hi, John Miles, hope all's well with you ....  I trust the Icon's out of mourning now...

No. Sorry it was Midland. Look at the thread on Midland Dining car on the Pre Grouping forum.It was around until 1979 before withdrawal to NRM. My late friend would not have made a mistake like that!

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  • 4 weeks later...

There is a regular trickle of enquiries on RMWeb asking for information relating to the Midland Railway. The latest is for Cudworth Station. It would seem that many people are not aware that there is a Midland Railway Study Centre. This is located in the Silk Mill Museum in Derby. There is an online catalogue (http://www.midlandrailwaystudycentre.org.uk/) but by no means everything is in this, there is a card index for the Derby Museums collection. In total there are over 40000 items relating to all aspects of the Midland Railway. Also a visit to the Search Engine at the NRM York is a good source of information. There does seem to be a growing tendency to try and get all information via the internet rather than getting off the settee and doing some real research. Looking at the real  thing is much more rewarding.

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There is a regular trickle of enquiries on RMWeb asking for information relating to the Midland Railway. The latest is for Cudworth Station. It would seem that many people are not aware that there is a Midland Railway Study Centre. This is located in the Silk Mill Museum in Derby. There is an online catalogue (http://www.midlandrailwaystudycentre.org.uk/) but by no means everything is in this, there is a card index for the Derby Museums collection. In total there are over 40000 items relating to all aspects of the Midland Railway. Also a visit to the Search Engine at the NRM York is a good source of information. There does seem to be a growing tendency to try and get all information via the internet rather than getting off the settee and doing some real research. Looking at the real  thing is much more rewarding.

 

 

By and large I agree with you.  However not everyone can easily travel to Derby, York or wherever depending on which company they are researching.  I often do visit places for specific information.

 

For example I could drive to Derby and back in a day, it's only a round trip of about 350 miles, say 3.5 hours plus each way.  Then I want to spend a day doing research.    So it's either a very long day out or an overnight stay.  Can get expensive for quite small bits of information.

 

Many people on RMWeb looking for information live very much further away than I do, so visits may be impossible.

 

Edited to add a missing comma.

David

Edited by DaveF
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The Midland railway Society has an e-group and many questions can be answered by their online membership, some of whom attend the Silk Ill regularly.   It is a great Society to belong to with a high quality journal and a separate Newsletter.

 

 

Jamie

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Im sure it shouldnt be expected of someone somewhere a distance away, let alone stuck in the USA , to go to some museum to look at a couple things. The reason we ask questions here is because we Cant do it ourselves.

Nothing bugs me more than when I ask a simple question and people refer me to some expensive out of print book or a museum piece and I just sit here wondering if "New York, USA" isnt clear enough under my picture.

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While a working member of the Midland railway center many many years ago I had the very great privilege of riding on the footplate of the MR single. the 7F and the compound while they were all in steam also I've had a firing turn on the 4F 4027 and stood on the footplate of the Kirtley 2-4-0 while it was being shunted into the shed so it was as close as a cab ride I guess one can get on the Kirtley.

    As charming as the Midland engines were I still feel it held back the LMS design wise for the first ten years after the grouping.

  The midland could build larger locos as the 7F shows which were tried on the Toton London coal trains but it was the short loops that made the move to a bigger freight loco unfeasible during midland days.

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Possibly what is needed is a sort of Wiki of sources on the Midland Railway (and I presume other railways as well) which at least gives directions. The problem of distance does make things difficult. I live in South Wales so a trip to York for me involves an overnight stop. It depends how affluent you are and how understanding your family is. As for living in the USA, you have my sympathy.

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Which is what is happening in France, where there is already a very large Wiki-PLM site and a nascent Wiki-Midi.

 

The problem in the UK may be that there are too many specialist societies who have vested interests  in holding on to their information.  I have an interest in the pre-grouping eras but I am not about to join the Brighton Circle (just as an example) just to get a single wagon or coach drawing plus their associated background data (running numbers etc.).  And knowing my luck only then to find that such drawings do not exist.

 

Please also do not misunderstand, I think these societies do enormous good work and we would be the poorer without them.  However, more open access to the wealth of knowledge that they have would be of benefit to many - even if with a small user fee.

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Which is what is happening in France, where there is already a very large Wiki-PLM site and a nascent Wiki-Midi.

 

The problem in the UK may be that there are too many specialist societies who have vested interests  in holding on to their information.  I have an interest in the pre-grouping eras but I am not about to join the Brighton Circle (just as an example) just to get a single wagon or coach drawing plus their associated background data (running numbers etc.).  And knowing my luck only then to find that such drawings do not exist.

 

Please also do not misunderstand, I think these societies do enormous good work and we would be the poorer without them.  However, more open access to the wealth of knowledge that they have would be of benefit to many - even if with a small user fee.

Yes. Societies do a great job, but theres no sense to locking the information in a safe and giving only members the key. If they could give a better reason to join the society other than view records, they could still have profit from members and have a public archive.

 

Though I must say. The L&Y society was VERY helpful in finding information on a van. I got quite a few photos and drawings through a conversation with their photograph department. Though my location may have helped in my success, he was very friendly anyway.

 

Maybe having a more in depth email service. So you cant just go online and view them, but you can email them for something specific. It would give feedback to the society directly about where interests lie, and where they should focus their efforts more in presenting to the public.

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So, who is going to scan and index all these historic papers? Who is going to set up the required website? Who is going to spend the time answering emails? Where is the money going to come from?

What you are suggesting is great, but it requires resource. That can't just happen out of nowhere.

Of course it cant happen out of nowhere. I never said that. But pushing the idea out as impossible hurts the possible preservation of history.

I would have figured they would have scanned the documents already rather than having a room filled with filing cabinets. So theres that, the required website is something they already have, the societies website, all they would need is page listing the documents held. Most societies with a website should already have a few emails set up, but yes, email answering would be the weak point, and they would need a few people to do that.

Finally, money. Maybe a reason why to join the society would be for ease of access, maybe have a limit to the documents allowed for non members, and if you really cared about the information so much, you would either choose to donate or join.

Yes its not a fool proof plan, but its a start.

To deny possibility locks off any chance of improvement.

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Of course it cant happen out of nowhere. I never said that. But pushing the idea out as impossible hurts the possible preservation of history.

I would have figured they would have scanned the documents already rather than having a room filled with filing cabinets. So theres that, the required website is something they already have, the societies website, all they would need is page listing the documents held. Most societies with a website should already have a few emails set up, but yes, email answering would be the weak point, and they would need a few people to do that.

Finally, money. Maybe a reason why to join the society would be for ease of access, maybe have a limit to the documents allowed for non members, and if you really cared about the information so much, you would either choose to donate or join.

Yes its not a fool proof plan, but its a start.

To deny possibility locks off any chance of improvement.

Unfortunately nothing is as simple as it sounds.   The vast store that the Midland Railway Society, NRM etc have are all in a variety of different formats and many are very difficult to scan accurately.  I have a collection of Midland Railway engineering drawings for overhead electrification equipment from 1907.  They were given to me and will eventually go to the Midland railway Society as I wish them to be available for inspection and study. They are two A0 size binders with the plans bound into them.  Due to the age and fragility of some of the paper they can't be opened out flat.   Also very few organisations have the facility to scan documents of this sort as large flat bed scanners have just about gone.  Most firms have roller scanners but these drawings can't be put through a roller scanner.  

 

I did manage to get some of them scanned by the British Library , which I live near but there is still distortion near the binding edge.   We've also tried photographing them with a decent digital camera.  This gives some detail but again is not perfect and the condition that we had to do the job were not ideal.  

 

I would dearly love to have alll these drawings available a  website but am struggling to find a method to do that.  they are an absolutely unique record of the first high voltage overhead electrification in the UK.  

 

This is just one small example of the sort of item that is available in the MRS archive.  I can't speak for the team that run the Silk Mill but the people that I know are very passionate about sharing the information that they have and have no desire to lock it away.  Part of the same team are helping as volunteers at the NRM to hep catalogue their vat collection, along with members of other line societies.   It all takes a vast amount of effort.   One friend of mine is helping with a collection of 16000 35 mm images.  He can opnly sort and identify 180 a day if he is lucky.

 

I hope this doesn't sound negative but I just wanted to let readers know how difficult some of these tasks are.

 

 

Jamie

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I think the suggestion that specialist societies have "vested interests in holding onto their information" is a slightly odd one. The raison d'etre of the Brighton Circle (as I am familiar with that society) is "collecting and publishing information" on the LB&SCR. Inevitably, publication, in the first instance, tends to be in the in-house journal, so that research is exposed first to those who can offer critical comment. Most of the Society's subscription goes towards printing and circulating that journal, to create a journal of record for research that would not normally be published in the over the counter magazines or is not yet mature enough to appear in book form. 

There are filing cabinets (and drawing presses) of raw data at places like the NRM at York and the PRO at Kew (both open to the public), but most raw data does not, in itself, tell a coherent story and it must usually be collated into a useable format so that an informative picture begins to emerge. As an example, the carriage registers of the LBSCR provide you with long lists of carriage numbers and build costs, but it is only when you put this together with surviving diagrams and then cross reference that with photos (and indeed surviving carriage bodies) that you get an analysis that is useful. LB&SCR Carriages Vol 1 by Ian White, Simon Turner and Sheina Foulkes (published by Kestrel Railway Books for £29-95) is a really valuable piece of research that has required the sustained effort of the three authors over a number of years, but, if you only want a single carriage drawing, it can be ordered from your local library (although I am not sure how this would work when you live in New York or France). Similarly, An Illustrated History of Southern Wagons, by Bixley, Blackburn, Chorley and King will answer most of your questions about Brighton wagons. Again, this is not simply a compendium of copies of the official drawings/diagrams; the published drawings have been redrawn to be rather more useful to railway modellers and are supported by other information on use, lifespan, etc.    

I can't speak for other line societies, but, where it is possible to provide a non member with a relatively simple answer (or suggest where he or she can access the information themselves), I know of many cases where this has been done.

Best wishes

Eric   

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There doesn't have to be scanning of documents etc. Wikipedia relied on people putting on a web site what information they had to hand. It could start with places that contain items of interest and then be expanded slowly as people choose to add more information. There is a huge resource of information in Midland Record. An online list of contents would be useful. The same for Midland Railway Society Journal. There are various books relating to the Midland - for example Summerson, Dow,  Essery et al, Twells. Judging by the questions that have been asked by people on RMWeb, some people are not aware of these sources. Someone as old as me is aware of what was published 20 or more years ago but younger modellers may not be and as has been pointed out in this thread, people overseas have to rely largely on books. If a few people have to put in a lot of work, this won't happen. If it is a resource to which people add gradually without a huge amount of effort at any particular time, it could work.

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AndyY has a separate post about negativity, and I am afraid we see some of that here.

 

Would it be easy to create the databases? no - no one said it would.  Is it anything like very difficult to impossible?

 

http://railsdautrefois.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=26

 

All in French I am afraid but 15 000 documents stored over 20 000 pages.  (The English flag takes you to a page that is not a translation of this page.)

 

Le Circle Historique du Rails Français started 5 years ago amid the same sort of negativity being expressed by some here.  It now has 500 members and the website for the PLM and the one for the Midi underway.

 

Rather than listing all the reasons why it cannot be done - for one particularly difficult document - why cannot we focus on how it could be done for the 98% of what is available?

 

As for loss of revenue, as I have said a form of nominal charging would I am sure be accepted by most, and as far as the French group above, I think they have gained rather than lost members thanks to the site - and they charge nothing for using the site.

Edited by Andy Hayter
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Hi All.

I am chairman of one of the smaller line groups as well as a modeller. We do try to publish as much information, drawings etc as we can but as has already been said we don't have enough manpower to do all we would like. There is also a financial implication as publishing is costly and has to at least break even. The 'ordinary non active member' is a valuable asset in that their subscriptions and purchase of what we do produce enables the continuing work of disseminating what we have. However we will never be able to make all we have available no matter how much we would like to.

I think most line societies will answer specific questions, there will be a few 'experts' in different areas who can often help. However we frequently get the general 'tell me everything you know about xxx station' type of question just pixxxxes us off. If you want help you have to give something in return. I know I need to do some research if I want an accurate model but some folk expect everything on a plate

Ian

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I have created a new topic for listing pre-grouping websites, etc.

 

This is a useful start. Well done to the "negative" Mr Dunkley. As Chairman Mao said, a long journey starts with a single step. Maybe this will be the only step. Ot depends on the reaction from others.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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HELP

Can someone explain how I can upload pictures ,diagrams etc. on to this forum. I would like to start the ball rolling with some of my information but can't seem to get past the 1mb. limit

Tony

Hi Tony, You can only upload jpg's of less than 1mb.  If you haven't got photoshop go into the Apps menu at the top of the page and then into Image editor.  Open the image from your computer then go to Image size and reduce the width to 1000.  When you close it will prompt you to save.  Do so with a new file name.

 

Then open up the topic and use reply with attachments.   Broswe to the new version and upload then attach.   You can then place it in topic.   Hope this makes sense.

 

Jamie

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