DenysW

I wasn't aware until this post that The Buddha was red/green colour-blind, together with 7% of all men. Thank you, @iL Dottore, for helping me achieve Enlightenment (at least on this sub-topic).

Financially non-coal minerals were dominant, but in terms of activity, there was a surprising amount of passenger. Data from BoT returns.

HH: Please read up on the concept of the "Disease Vector" Also please do not forget that they are disease vectors even after the age of obvious snot-candles (phrase learned from #1 daughter re her/our rug rats.)

The Dogger Bank?

On a quick look on Google maps, @Edwin_m has it wrapped up. The Knighton tunnel is two bores, one in mainline use, one for goods/abandoned/lightly used. So re-instating to 4-track at two levels (the new one lower) plus a new (lower) island platform at Leicester on the (largely unused) sidings and goods bypass are seems to solve problems without shutting traffic off for many months. Just paying for it to go then.

For completeness, Kilby Bridge. FWIW Bing and Google Maps are both locked in the past. Looking at the tree/shrub clearance on the embankments between Leicester & Market Harborough I'd say the intrusive work had been done to avoid the bird-nesting season, although March and April are also best avoided if the habitats might have hibernating snakes.

I attended one - same daughter was singing. Paul Bunyan. One of the worst musical experiences of my life. Plus massive irritation that he was putting out a gratuitously anti-American 'plot' whilst hiding from the privations of WW2 on Long Island. ENO is the victim of the purists being forced to (now only 50%) relocate whereas Royal Opera House isn't, and suffering significantly more severe budget cuts.

The knitting is visually complete (at least) as far as Kilsby Bridge. At the B562 crossing just south of the Junction there's no sign of anything new looking north, but looking south there's some HV stuff, but no wires or pylons. Southwards:

And doesn't help itself by typically being sung in its original language thus making it even more remote from its potential public. Purists (annoyingly including my daughter the music graduate) believe that this ensures the words do fit as well as possible, but I'm not convinced. In fact, totally unconvinced. Do the Italians pile into opera in the same numbers when it's sung in German, Czech, or Russian?

Still smarting from the (historical but ultimate) insult/put-down of only meriting a Branchline Terminus by the Midland Counties Railway.

You are confusing Nottingham with (at least one of) Leicester, Coventry, Lichfield, Tamworth, Walsall ... the list is almost endless because it does not include the unlamented Trent Station.

The rails in both seem to have been very similar to IKB's Great Western shape.

I believe that the Lickey was Vignoles rail as well. Mea culpa. I hadn't realised that Vignoles rail did not have the longitudinal sleepers of IKB's baulk track (nor his original then abandoned vertical pillars), so was a distinctly different (and cheaper) design. That seems to have looked to artists indistinguishable. Shame it seems to have rocked.

I assume it was in the £900k of track upgrades that caused a fuss with the auditors in August 1849. 35 miles of Birmingham & Gloucester is certainly mentioned, as well as 35 miles of Midland Counties, and some other bits and bobs.

Presumably freight then. It would give the same "Foreign Lines Worked" for a map, but not show up in passenger timetables. I don't believe that family saloons, horseboxes. etc. would count as then all the 1913 maps (a new requirement in the accounts that year) would show virtually all of the Great Britain network. I attach a poor photo of said map.