Beware of Ordnance Survey Maps

[Donw]

Os Maps are usually pretty accurate with regard to the position of road bridges and things like that whereas additional sidings may not have been noticed. Working on telephones in Telford I met quite a few OS staff trying to keep up with all the building work. We also used large scale plans derived from OS for the GPO plant I have a couple of bits that show some railway.

 

Don

[andyrush]

Hi Andy,

 

Which database are you referring to, please? And how does one get access?

It's private (because nobody has been able to figure out how to make it internet accessible at a price we can afford) and if you post questions on here, I will answer if the database holds any relevant information. No answer = no information!

[Poor Old Bruce]

Many years ago I bought a 2.5 inch map of Derby from the series in the blue covers. It showed the new A38 which was built in the 1970s but not a signifcant housing estate built in the 1950s. To be fair, it did state that the general date was of a particular date (can't remember what off hand) with major road updates to 1970-something.

 

Some of the older maps which could be useful to such as us for researching track layouts do have to be taken with a pinch of salt as the odd crossover could get missed out.

 

Also remember that railway signalling diagrams are just what they say on the box. They do not need to include every siding.

[TheQ]

The estate My parents live on is quite large and was built around 1975, it still wasn't on OS maps by 2000 (the last time I bought one )  and may not be on yet for all I know.

The Q

[Clive Mortimore]

Like any information when doing any research, and research into a railway station no different form any other research, you should not rely on one source only. An OS map with the track plan, the location of the buildings etc. is a very good aid to work with along with all the other information you can get on the location.

[dagrizz]

I visited the town library of a station I was interested in and found two copies of the 1:2500 maps of the local area. One was dated 1950 and appears to be correct. The other was also dated 1950 but the cartographer had just added all the new roads and houses built in the subsequent 30 years to the original map and not changed anything else. So, for instance, the station and goods yard, which were closed in 1965 and demolished in 1968, were still on the map.

 

Graham  

[Kenton]

It is easy to pooh pooh the OS maps. But they are a considerable resource with amazing detail. Just think of the costs involved, man power resource required to map so much detail all over the country from the easily accessible towns to the odd out crop of rocks half-way up a mountain.

 

Maybe not perfect in historical accuracy but as good as it gets unless you have a time machine.

 

Photos are a bonus if you can get to see them and if you trust the camera angle and date taken. But even looking back to recent times photos can be poor or simply unobtainable, going back 100 or even 150 years and they are pretty non-existent.

 

Research is fine, if you are local and have ready access to the records, most railway modellers simply do not have that available to them.

[peach james]

Just consider what OS maps were for- Ordinance Survey...IE, where the artillery was going to land. 10 ft out on a 75mm round=irrelevant

 

(Q-how far apart are towns in Germany? A- About 10 Kilotons...)

 

In general, the OS maps are a treasure trove of information, but need to have other sources of information. I have 3 of the 25" ones that I have used for Long Marton. They give a great overview of the area. I'd love a 40" map, or more period photos, but I have enough for now to do that the information I have is very useful. I also have about 200 photos taken in Long Marton in 1996 and 2006, which show a lot of the topographical details of the area. I'm currently using a batch of them to scale from, and modify, one 6"x6" square of ground on the model. Beware that there always will be differences between various sources- Rails in the Fells in my case is not quite right...

 

James

[Adrian]

Just consider what OS maps were for- Ordinance Survey...IE, where the artillery was going to land. 10 ft out on a 75mm round=irrelevant

 

[snip]

 

James

 

According to the website it was more for defence planning - but the origins as you say are from the Board of Ordnance (Ministry of Defence)

 

 

 

 

It was back in 1791, whilst planning defences to repel any invasion, that the Government realised the South Coast of England needed to be comprehensively and accurately mapped. So it instructed its Board of Ordnance – the defence ministry of the day – to carry out the necessary survey work.

That historic decision led to the mapping of the whole country in detail, and is also the source of the intriguing name 'Ordnance Survey'.

[AngryMeerkat]

The OS are quite well known for their 'errors' - in very early maps there was a certain coast of Africa that appeared on maps to be the shape of an elephants head. Apparently the soldiers doing the survey thought of the area as too desolate and nobody would visit, so they just drew and elephant.

 

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links to other websites, so mods please feel free to remove the following link if it is deemed against the rules ....

 

For some great examples of OS map omissions have a look around the website www.secret-bases.co.uk it is focused on military installations but shows the differences between different map scales and published dates. And it's a great way to find out some very random places you never knew were there!!

 

Mark

Edited February 9, 2013 by AngryMeerkat

[petethemole]

Many of the original Ordnance Office drawings of trhe 1790s are viewable on line at http://www.oldmapsonline.org/#bbox=-110.136719,-51.991812,119.785156,71.99589&q=&datefrom=1000&dateto=2010. Enter the location and scroll down the sidebar to find them.

Pete

[Pacific231G]

On 09/02/2013 at 16:09, peach james said:

Just consider what OS maps were for- Ordinance Survey...IE, where the artillery was going to land. 10 ft out on a 75mm round=irrelevant

James

It's a nice idea but they weren't surveying Great Britain for gun laying purposes.  It was simply that the job of preparing government maps, initially for the military, was given to the Board of Ordnance which was essentially engaged in what would now be called logistics including the supply of armaments and munitions to the military but picked up other jobs such as mainitaining coastal fortifications. The job of surveying the country (starting with what is now the site of Heathrow Airport) was therefore called the Ordnance Survey and later became a separate department.

You're right to be cautious about maps though: I've found some real oddities. In the French "Etat Major" map from about 1857, the final kilometre of the new ligne de Vincennes from its Paris Bastille terminus is correctly shown as only planned. The rest of the line to its first outer terminus at La Varenne had by then been built and is shown as such but the final section to the Place de la Bastille was delayed by a planning dispute. The 1200 metre long line connecting the Vincennes line to the Paris-Mulhouse main line at Nogent, which had a strategic importance for the army, is also shown as complete. The problem is that this connecting line was never actually built or even started Someone studying the history of this line might conclude that the connecting line had been built and that could become accepted wisdom. It won't because this particular line is too well known but for a more obscure location it would be easy to be led astray.

Edited May 1, 2019 by Pacific231G
clarity

[AndyGCR]

The OS are quite well known for their 'errors' - in very early maps there was a certain coast of Africa that appeared on maps to be the shape of an elephants head. Apparently the soldiers doing the survey thought of the area as too desolate and nobody would visit, so they just drew and elephant.

 

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post links to other websites, so mods please feel free to remove the following link if it is deemed against the rules ....

 

For some great examples of OS map omissions have a look around the website www.secret-bases.co.uk it is focused on military installations but shows the differences between different map scales and published dates. And it's a great way to find out some very random places you never knew were there!!

 

Mark

 

I have a few OS maps from pre and post war where both WD Longmoor, Burton Dasset and Bicester rail links and depots appear, disappear and then reappear again in succesive editions!

[Orinoco]

Even when information is as accurate and comprehensive as we might wish, we still have to factor in competence of the person doing the modelling. Let's not criticise what is an invaluable resource. In good hands, it is extremely useful. In the wrong hands, even good information is of little use.

Edited February 9, 2013 by Orinoco

[Pacific231G]

Os Maps are usually pretty accurate with regard to the position of road bridges and things like that whereas additional sidings may not have been noticed. Working on telephones in Telford I met quite a few OS staff trying to keep up with all the building work. We also used large scale plans derived from OS for the GPO plant I have a couple of bits that show some railway.

 

Don

Consider yourself lucky that you weren't working from this plan.

 

I found it while looking for maps of Paris and it's a cross section of one of the sewers. At first sight running the city's fresh water supply through the sewers may not seem a particularly good idea, though it does make the pipes accessible, but they appear to have carried every other service as well. Too bad if the phone line you had to work on was the one on the side over the channel. I don't know whether pneumatique was a compressed air supply or more likely the pneumatic despatch for letters. Some of the sewers also had a line marked "Horloge" which I assume was a time signal like the pips and even power cables though a wet sewer and electricity don't seem an ideal combination.

 

For a truly delightful working environment for a telephone engineer this one must have been lovely.

 

 

The Paris sewers did make considerable use of railways of various kinds, mostly for maintenance and removing accumulated rubbish, and there are still a few places where tracks emerge from rather mysterious doorways often onto canal quays.

Edited February 9, 2013 by Pacific231G

[Clive Mortimore]

Just consider what OS maps were for- Ordinance Survey...IE, where the artillery was going to land. 10 ft out on a 75mm round=irrelevant

 

 

James

 

That would have been considered a miss with 31 Battery's 105mm light guns .....I would say that as thier gun fitter.

 

Having worked with the Battery Captain's safety team, we used OS maps to plot the potential fall of the shells to ensure the information being given by the observation post to the command post was in the target area of the range and then to check the information being given to the guns by the command post was the same. The population of Amesbury and surrounding villages were not that keen on being shelled.

Edited February 9, 2013 by Clive Mortimore

[Tim V]

 The job of surveying the country (starting with Heathrow Airport) was therefore called the Ordnance Survey and later became a separate department.

I think you'll find the OS started long before Heathrow Airport existed, I remember it was called London Airport before!

 

Some of the really early mapping, at 1" scale is on the net. It makes very interesting research. Some of the mapping pre-dates canal construction, though I had a particular interest in looking at Swindon after the canal was built but pre-railway.

 

It is a great loss that the OS didn't start large scale mapping till late on, still we're lucky to have what we've got.

[buffalo]

I think you'll find the OS started long before Heathrow Airport existed, I remember it was called London Airport before!

That sounds like a strange corruption of the story of the survey that connected Greenwich and the Paris observatory under the Ordnance Survey Director, General William Roy, in 1784-90. The baseline for this triangulation crossed Hounslow Heath and part of the area now occupied by Heathrow.

 

There is a great deal of information on early mapping on the web. For example, some ebooks hosted by the Ordnance Surey

A History of the Ordnance Survey edited by W. A. Seymour (434 pages)

Map-makers to Britain since 1791 by Tim Owen and Elaine Pilbeam (206 pages)

 

Nick

[Pacific231G]

I think you'll find the OS started long before Heathrow Airport existed, I remember it was called London Airport before!

I was being slightly tongue in cheek. General Roy surveyed the first base line for the Principal Triangulation in 1784 and it did run across the site of the present Heathrow Airport so you could say that he started his triangulation with Heathrow. He just didn't know it, as building of the London Airport didn't start for another 160 years in 1944.

There had been an aerodrome owned by Fairey Aviation on part of the site since 1930  and though officially called The Great Western Aerodrome was also known as Heathrow Aerodrome or even Airport.

Edited February 11, 2013 by Pacific231G

[Fat Controller]

With OS Maps, one almost always finds things where they're shown to be. This isn't always the case elsewhere. In Italy, we followed a road that was shown to connect two major settlements, built to B-road equivalent standards. Within a few km of leaving the main road, our road began to narrow; soon it was a single carriageway, which eventually ended in a collection of forestry workers' cottages. On asking the locals, they said that such a road had been planned pre-war, but never built. It had been put onto the maps, which had been treated as Gospel, even by the Wermacht, one of whose columns followed it in 1944.

[PhilJ W]

The earliest 25" OS maps even used to show the internal layout of public buildings. I remember seeing an extraction from such a map in a book showing Strangeways prison in Manchester, each individual cell was shown. I can't remember if the railway line shown alongside the prison was treated in the same way.

[Clive Mortimore]

With OS Maps, one almost always finds things where they're shown to be. This isn't always the case elsewhere. In Italy, we followed a road that was shown to connect two major settlements, built to B-road equivalent standards. Within a few km of leaving the main road, our road began to narrow; soon it was a single carriageway, which eventually ended in a collection of forestry workers' cottages. On asking the locals, they said that such a road had been planned pre-war, but never built. It had been put onto the maps, which had been treated as Gospel, even by the Wermacht, one of whose columns followed it in 1944.

Ah Brian

 

The British army can go one better, well the REME Light Aid Detachment of 47 Field Regiment RA can. Even though I was posted to the LAD I was not party to this story. I was with my battery of guns and we had deployed in the dark after a night drive over the tracks of Salisbury Plain. We were up on a hill and we kept seeing a packet of vehicles go by, must have been 4 or 5 times. After a while they seem to get themselves into position, someone lit a fag and the high pitched whine of the LAD sergeant major could be heard as he shouted  " We are tactical, put that fag out". Following morning I went down to the LAD to get something, and asked my mate the unit clerk why did they keep going round in circles. The EME, officer in command of the LAD was in the lead Land Rover, directing his driver. He was following a crease in the map which he mistook for a road....so beware of OS maps or the person reading it.

[Tim V]

Remembered where the early stuff was, it's on

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/ordsurvdraw/index.html

[Joseph_Pestell]

Consider yourself lucky that you weren't working from this plan.

Egout rue Rambateau.jpg

 

I found it while looking for maps of Paris and it's a cross section of one of the sewers. At first sight running the city's fresh water supply through the sewers may not seem a particularly good idea, though it does make the pipes accessible, but they appear to have carried every other service as well. Too bad if the phone line you had to work on was the one on the side over the channel. I don't know whether pneumatique was a compressed air supply or more likely the pneumatic despatch for letters. Some of the sewers also had a line marked "Horloge" which I assume was a time signal like the pips and even power cables though a wet sewer and electricity don't seem an ideal combination.

 

For a truly delightful working environment for a telephone engineer this one must have been lovely.

Egout rue Aubry-le-Bopucher.jpg

 

 

The Paris sewers did make considerable use of railways of various kinds, mostly for maintenance and removing accumulated rubbish, and there are still a few places where tracks emerge from rather mysterious doorways often onto canal quays.

 

Not a nice working environment for the engineers. But must have saved a lot of digging up of the roads - so not a bad idea at all.

 

Is it definitely fresh water supply for drinking/domestic use or do they have a separate supply for all that water they use to wash down the roadside gutters each day in Paris? I noticed last month that Parisian dog owners not as good as they used to be at making their animals use the "caniveau".

[Joseph_Pestell]

The earliest 25" OS maps even used to show the internal layout of public buildings. I remember seeing an extraction from such a map in a book showing Strangeways prison in Manchester, each individual cell was shown. I can't remember if the railway line shown alongside the prison was treated in the same way.

 

Probably stopped doing this when an inmate used plans to design his escape tunnel.