DenysW

I thought I'd posted this, done because 'It was There', but apparently not here. Underlying data is ropey and has a couple of bodged corrections on each line. No wonder the MR didn't want to race the LNWR to Manchester. The MSL/GNR route was 3 miles longer and also went via the Woodhead Tunnel.

It's just a hobby, combined with (severe) annoyance at the History books that are fascinated with hardware (bridges, locomotives, carriages, stations, etc.), and events (when was Hudson's departure? Did he die?) and ignore questions like "Did it make sense and/or work financially?", "Were they (roughly) honest?", and so on. Also the question "Were the long-term survivors competent, and which was the best?" As such it was pre-collated, and I just had to find the piccies.

It's par-value capitalisation, I'm afraid, as declared by the railway companies in their accounts, and used by them to declare dividends as a function of their original £100 shares (or normalised to the same). This is also what the Bradshaw's Shareholder's Guides published pre-WW1 quoted. The Midland share prices (monthly data downloaded from a Yale University digitisation) compared to the sector market average were as below, as are the MSL/GCR Preferred and Deferred prices. All of the shares were very volatile, with +/- 10% in a year very possible even for the quieter ones. I've put Bradshaw's Midland annual max/min numbers as a table after the graphs. So p/e ratios are even more noisy and problematic to the point where I haven't bothered to calculate them. The MSL/GCR prices show that the market lost faith in the GCR's Preferred shares once it started the London Extension, and never had much faith in it Ordinary/Deferred shares coming back. As a final note, even the LC&D Ordinary shares (which didn't pay a dividend from insolvency in the 1860s to WW1) did not trade at zero value, showing a market that must have over-valued railway stocks - compared to predicted reality - rather than undervalued them.

A propos of nothing, and just because I'd drawn it up, I present the (rough) gradient profiles of the London-Manchester (London Road) pre-Grouping options. Data is from mixed sources (none of which were perfect) and includes a couple of bodges on each line to get/keep the elevations in line with physical reality. No wonder the Midland didn't want to start a 'Race to Manchester'. Other Midland profiles (to Manchester Central) possible, but all go via the same Peak Forest summit.

I've been struggling to work out how to define the data that would show whether a big investment was worthwhile. The London/Manchester extensions of the Midland clearly were (Capitalisation increase by 50%, receipts by 100%, profitability maintained, general England/wales receipts increase only about 60%, all numbers wildly rounded). The S&C was too small to tell (the cost is reported as £3-5M, whereas the Midland's capitalisation was £65M in 1879). The Great Northern's Derbyshire Extension was mildly negative, and the Great Central's London Extension would probably have been a success if they hadn't done Part 2, Joint with GWR. The Midland's takeover of the Leeds & Bradford was clearly a fiasco financially (10% interest paid), whereas the Bristol and Gloucester (6% interest paid) was probably just over-optimistic, and the Leicester & Swannington (8% interest paid) was too small to reveal how bad a deal it was. I'm also convinced that, whatever the Manchester & Leeds Railway's thinking, the immediately-following Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway would have known it couldn't afford the £45k/year for the Leeds & Bradford. It didn't have the turnover, and it now had much higher capitalisation than when it was single. So there was no effective competition to buy the L&B, irrespective of any claims Hudson made. As for dividends it's pretty much in line with @Compound2632's summary. A downward trend overall 1873-1893, the coal strike blip in 1893, then stability or a slight improvement to WW1. It is however, necessary to dig deeper to understand that the Great Central wasn't as bad as this graph implies. Only about 20% of its share capitalisation was Ordinary stock, and it didn't do anywhere near as bad a job of paying dividends on its Preferred stock - mostly at 4%. There were only about 5 years where it failed to pay out on most of the Preferred.

I can't think of a major British railway project that ran even close to budget, but I'm mostly very Victorian-focussed. My examples of ones that didn't include: - The Midland's Settle-Carlisle extension - The Midland's (co-incident) London and Manchester extensions - The Forth Bridge - The Great Central's London Extension - Early tunnels, e.g The Leicester & Swannington's Glenfield Tunnel - The Channel Tunnel Add inflation (this thread has pointed out that the costs in 2018-£ haven't ballooned) with a lack of interest that the benefits will also have inflated, and you have HS2.

Woking. Next question, although Guildford and Cobham & Stoke Dabernon are acceptable alternative answers.

In beautiful Leicester this applies, but only to the self-checkout options. There's also an exit gate without this security immediately next to the entry gates, presumably to facilitate shoplifting.

For Completeness, 1910. About an hour faster, and including now a 14:00 departure from Euston. It also brought up the question as to the need for an Express from Barry & Cardiff to Hull (with connection to Glasgow) in the Great Central timetable. 1

Surely that was Mumbai on that logic?

Sort-of as requested. Anglo-Scottish expresses, but 1887 before 'The Corridor' was named? I do like the idea of a specialised (slower) express with facilities for horses & carriages. Great Northern a specialist in overnight services. Don't use the Great Northern to get to Glasgow.

Are there implication on paths if not speed? I thought that full-barriers were interlocked so that trains would stop in time if the barriers failed. This surely is a hit on frequency if not on speed.

Sadly. no. There are three Bradshaw series: The (twice-Yearly?) Timetable guide, the (yearly) Shareholders Guide, and the (intermittent?) one Michael Portillo uses in the TV series that describes the places and is really, really confusing until you are used to it. It is based on what you'd do/see/stay as you travel along a mainline route and drift off down the Branches. So to look for a Goods service and its (potential) conflicts with Passenger services you'd need to fish out the Working Timetable (often shortened to WTT) for the company in question. The National Archives at Kew has a complete annual set of these for the Midland; I haven't checked the LNWR. BUT Many of the lines were much less used than we expect post-Beeching. 4 Passenger Trains/day in each direction for branches wasn't unusual. Repeating @johnofwessex's point in a different direction, in pre-Grouping days the Branch services might be timed to arrive at a Junction station at a convenient time for the railway to transfer passengers to/from services that had set out at sensible departure time scores or hundred or miles away. I think it was @Compound2632 that first made that point to me and it's fully valid. This is also why goods services were frequently scheduled to run on the mainlines overnight - why clog up your busier track with slow-moving goods/minerals at a time when the paths are needed for passengers. Also Mixed goods/passenger was very rare in England & Wales: less than 0.5% of all trainmiles. Commoner in Scotland & Ireland.

More numbers, I'm afraid. I've given below the actual average distances travelled by passengers for 1866 (in miles one-way) in each class. After that the Board of Trade did not report the numbers required to give a direct calculation, but what it did report (giving the average fare per journey) did not show great changes to WW1. So yes, @johnofwessex's logic is sound about arrival/departure times for Anglo-Scottish traffic, but the large majority of the customers were only going a few stops. This isn't just my arithmetic, which is not always above criticism. Mr. Cleghorn (North-Eastern Railway) supplied collated data for Bradshaw's Shareholder's guides in the 1860s and has very similar UK-wide numbers for revenue per journey. For what its worth he also gives the average train journey at 21 miles (passenger) and 30 miles (goods).

I've yet to see any actual numerical evidence in support of this widespread belief/assertion. What there is implies the Midland ran the correct size of passenger train for its number of passengers (about 35-40 overall average per train) at much the same speed (in mph terminus-terminus) as its long-distance competitors. It also seems to have avoided provoking its competitors (especially the LNWR) into a 'Race to Manchester' knowing it had a much more severe set of gradients to work (another reason for light trains), and it could not 'win' at a sensible operating cost. From Bradshaw timetables: It also gradually increased its passenger speeds, but did not especially respond to the arrival of the Great Central (direct competition Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester-London via a similar route). Although I believe the GCR was more interested in the Midland's coal and merchandise business than its passengers. The poor performance in 1869 was that it was trying a combination of express & semi-fast after opening St. Pancras, and the latter drag the averages down. I all cases I've omitted the Parliamentary trains that stop at every station.

It's my view that there were weak short-span iron bridges everywhere built after, say 1850. If you look at the GWR, which had a multi-layer Route Availability strategy, most of it (in miles) was at 17 tons/axles or less. The Midland's seems to have been the less sophisticated South/North of Leeds. The Great Northern stands out like at sore thumb for allowing 20 tons/axle for its pre-WW1 Atlantics. What the Midland seems to have had (Cox refers to this glancingly) is a self-imposed tons/ft criterion for locomotives that effectively stopped it looking at 0-8-0s and 4-6-0s, etc.

In terms of gross receipts in 1912 it was 17:14:6 (in millions) LNWR:MR:LYR, making LNWR+LYR about 150% of the Midland, and it got 50% more directors. Seems to have ended up generous to the small players, and about right for the big ones.

Wasn't there a recent one in Birmingham where the (stolen?) car was abandoned by a platform?

It's the only thing that makes sense for the L&Y going into the LNWR early - to make the new-LNWR much more powerful in directorships than the Midland and the Caledonian. Less dogmatic about the H&B into the NER - maybe they felt they'd get a better reception in the middle of the LNER than right on one edge of the LMS? Better the devil you know? I believe the legislation that did the share holding/conversion rates was simply based on the year 1913. The Cally then objected (in court) that 1913 had been a worse year for them than the others, and was 6 months late joining the LMS

My uninformed opinion is that he was ground down by his war service, and just didn't want to preside over an extra 5 years of bickering, sniping, and bedding down of companies used to co-existing only because there was no other choice. If he'd wanted to seize the bull by the horns (other parts available) he could have moved all new design work to Horwich, and started Beames earlier on sorting out the inefficient mess that was Crewe. He didn't.

All of this was fully true until 1914 (passenger) and 1900 (freight). Then the freight started to get heavier duties as 5F to 7Fs were introduced outside the Midland and the resulting knock-on effects on passing loops etc. sorted out. Trouble was the LMS didn't have a convincingly good freight design more powerful the the Midland 4F. The L&Y were using 5F 0-8-0s one of which was 'Locomotive K' in the bridge stress testing, which set new records for the potential to cause damage at (higher than service) speeds. Especially with hindsight I'm not impressed with the LMS decision not to consider designs outwith the L&Y, the Midland, and the LNWR. On the OP, my understanding is that Stanier's innovation was to tell the Operating Department to give him a duty they wanted new locomotives for, and not just to tell him what to build. Collett might well have done the same.

I'm certain I don't know what is meant by route miles. The sum of Owned+leased + part-owned + Foreign? Foreign being running-rights without ownership. or income from intermediate stops (my understanding). I'm using A->B miles, which is what was reported as track miles and ignores single/double/multiple. This latter was also very variable between pre-Grouping companies. The Midland was mostly double track , with relatively little single. The GWR was 50% single track. If Foreign is included in route miles, I'd point out it can be very arbitrary and variable. The great increase in the GNR is the introduction of KX-Edinburgh non-stop, which can't have been all that dramatic in trainmiles across the whole company. I don't have an explanation for the late drop in GCR Foreign miles unless it still used GNR metals for some expresses until it opened Phase 2 (GCR/GWR Joint) of its London Extension.

What isn't often mentioned is that Government cut maintenance during WW1 as well as during WW2. There's a plaintive note in the M&GN Joint Accounts that they've reduced the capitalisation of the company because they didn't feel it was the true reflection to pay out the reduced costs as dividends. So the railways were entering the Brave New World of post-WW1 economics with a cumulative backlog of maintenance, and with four years of virtually no new tractive power. Lots of spend needed, and at share prices (as noted above) that made capital markets useless. What Grouping failed to achieve, and Nationalisation started to work on was the lines that existed only to provide Entity A access to the markets of Entity B. The Welsh Heads of Valleys line really only existed to get LNWR/LMS coal out of GWR heartlands. It was gone by the early 1950s. However, the administrative regions of nationalised BR were the Grouped companies: I've seen it asserted that if the Somerset & Dorset had been put into BR(W) instead of an ongoing joint responsibility, it would have gone the same way. Parliament had hobbled the LC&D/SER merger by imposing terms that did not allow rationalisation. I've not looked at Grouping.

The simplest answer to @Nearholmer's question, which I believe to be 'did the cumulative dividends ever cover the capital cost of the railway?'. If you say that the Midland's increase in capital after 1897 was almost all an illusion, then Yes, for the Midland, by about 1900. The MS&L/Great Central: No, Never even close. I'm still extracting the cash-value-of-dividends for some of the other companies. I'm ignoring dividends paid by ancestor companies, and I've bodged the MSL/GCR numbers because I do not (yet?) have the cash dividend before 1854.

There are a couple of those, with some very interesting details and approaches, ending in the conclusion that a 'rational' investor would have stopped holding investments in UK Railways by about 1900. I couldn't follow that, because it wasn't actually supported by data. That doesn't mean it was wrong, of course. I think it simply means that the better UK railway companies (mostly centred in the middle and the north of England) suffered catastrophic declines in their share prices between the peak in 1898 and their minimum in 1922, losing about 70% of their value, and making it essentially impossible for them to raise new capital. As there don't seem to be corresponding changes-in-profitability issues (other than the long-established gradual squeeze on operating margins) I think this implies that competing investments, especially Government bonds were now paying the same or better than the railways at lower risk.