DenysW

This may be a technical nit-pick, but I thought the Midland simply helped guarantee the Forth Bridge company would pay 4% on its shares. It was pointed out somewhere that if the Midland was a part-owner, then that section of track would have had to appear on the 1913 map in its accounts, and it doesn't. Certainly it didn't report income from the Forth Bridge in its Net Revenue account, where it reported on other Joint companies. Same for both points for the Great Northern. I haven't checked the others. Apologies to @Compound2632 for the overlap with his reply.

Agreed. But the NER started declaring a steady 1.2 million passenger electric train-miles/year in 1905, about 8% of their steam passenger train-miles. The Midland didn't have enough to declare them separately. For down-and-dirty passenger-service experience, I'd partner with the NER. The NER electrical goods was negligible, at about 6,000 train-miles/year.

This actually looks to me like the (very) early Midland in the second half of 1847 making good on a commitment by either the Bristol and Gloucester (Broad Gauge) or the Birmingham and Gloucester (standard gauge) to support the (Broad Gauge) South Devon, and to see if its atmospheric railway could solve the Lickey Bank. There was £60,000 on the Capital account for South Devon shares in 1847, as well as slightly more again split across the MS&L, the South Staffs, and the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock And Midland Junction. As to the Midland being a GWR shareholder, I'm not so sure. The South Devon payments appear in the Net Revenue part of the accounts until the first half of 1881, but not the second half. The income from the MS&L disappears in 1875, and the South Staffs at the end of 1872.

Agreed. Although the 4F 0-6-0s didn't appear in numbers until after WW1, partly due to that war. But by 1900 the other companies were mostly moving on from 4-4-0s to 4-6-0s, and from 0-6-0s to 0-8-0s, not always resulting in successful designs. As an example I was checking the GNR a couple of days ago and it was producing the 5F K1s from 1901. With a bigger grate/boiler these would have been 7F.

The share prices of the LT&S did not indicate a need to seek take-over, If anything the market post-1897 viewed it appreciably more favourably than the larger England & Wales companies ( the Midland was included on its pre-1897 basis). Maybe it just felt the cost and project management of electrification was beyond it. In which case it should probably have approached the NER, not the Midland! For those unused to this stuff, when the price of your £100 Ordinary stock drops below £100 you have trouble issuing more without giving a discount. The next resort is therefore to issue Preferred stock at a fixed interest rate better than Government bonds. When you stop reliably paying the interest on these (example: the Great Central Railway post 1897), the last resort is debt. The GCR was actually in control of its fate and by 1912 had almost reached the point of paying all of its Preference shares and the interest on its debt, but wasn't at the point of retiring much debt. Data digitised by Yale University.

Also of the excerciser of the running powers being given zero priority compared to the trains run by the donor of the rights. See the Midland into Euston, the same into King's Cross, and the ploys used to make sure that the correct train pulled into Aberdeen first in the 'Race to the North'.

The Midland (deviously) duplicated its stock in line powers in with its 1897 Act that allowed it to quote dividends as if they were unduplicated*. It also had both Preferred shares that typically paid 4% (pre-1897 basis) and Ordinary stock that paid 5-6% (pre-1897-basis). As a result the duplicated shares halved in price on the stock market, and paid the same 4-5% against the purchase price as the unduplicated had. This doesn't make what @DCB said wrong, but it does make it more difficult to understand the LT&S transaction. This is also why the Midland's Capital apparently doubled 1897-1900 without any major investments. The Victorian investors were aware of all of this and Board of Trade actually published summaries (by year) of how much 'nominal' stock had been created. The Midland and the MS&L were probably the worst offenders, but almost all of the companies seem to have done some either duplication or splitting. So the Midland paid the LT&S shareholders marginally more (fixed) than the dividends the LT&S itself had been paying (variable), but only at a 1.5:1 ratio not a 3:1 ratio. Enough of a reason to accept the sale. * Reason: Otherwise they would have dropped below the 10-years-of-at-least-3% returns that was a requirement for many trustees operating Pension and other trusts.

All listed, but as 'sold out on pre-order'.

As the GNR was really the London, Leeds & Lincolnshire Railway, it could have gone for the Greater Manchester, Sheffield, Lincolnshire & London Railway. Needs a vowel though to make its acronym pronounceable.

What would it have been called? The Greatest? The Great Great Railway? The Railway? The mind boggles.

It is my understanding/recollection that ... The Thatcher government of the time was not willing to (part-)fund the Channel Tunnel, and insisted that it all be private sector. This instantly lead to cheap-skating when the tunnel cost double the forecasts, and the connection to Waterloo therefore rambled through Victorian-built backwaters in south London. They had to build the tunnel to eliminate using ferries. They didn't have to get the trains fast to London. Semi-related assertion/rant. On a cost-estimating course decades ago the subject of contingency came up. If you've never done this before (Channel Tunnel ticks this box, so, mostly does HS2)) you should allow 200-300% contingency in the early stages. If you've just done the same thing, the same size, in the same market, then you may go as low as 10%. You should also manage the contingency down as the project continues, and not treat it as a slush fund to cover early over-runs that were not due to unforeseeable circumstances.

Mostly I believe things were fairly static from 1850-1900, then efficiency pressures as the railways got less profitable improved things in terms of goods marshalling, and - probably in some companies only - the introduction of more powerful goods locomotives. With apologies about changing companies for the graphs, the one in train-miles, the other in passengers and tons, it's just what I have pre-cooked. Other companies (especially the North Eastern and the L&Y) were much better than the Midland at improving their revenue per goods-trainmile and started earlier. Several other companies showed a similar passenger-revenue profile to the Midland's in the 1870s, so it was not down to the 1875 abolition of 2nd class.

That's what I conclude. The only thing I can think of is that coal to retail coal merchants was 'merchandise' and that coal to industrial users was 'minerals' until a change in categorisation. This would explain the lack of change in revenue if all coal movements were accounted together, both before and after, industry-wide. I draw the opposite conclusion this time, that some were changing and some either weren't or didn't need to. I'm scarred on this by the miles quoted as 'part-owned' in the same accounts. The Great Northern was explicit that the reason for an apparent halving in part-owned trackmiles in 1880 was due to its changing the basis by factoring-in the degree of ownership. The Midland showed an even more dramatic reduction, but without comment and in 1905/1906. The Midland also quoted some Guaranteed Share payments as line rentals until it messed around generally with its shares following its 1897 Act. Burying Hudson's bad decisions in the small-print: deceptive but not dishonest or fraudulent. There was also discussion in the BoT reports on what was meant by a season ticket, for which only numbers and revenue were ever reported. I believe from this there was a change in the 1870s to normalise all of the data to annual-equivalent, so that the numbers would not simply reflect how many workmans weekly seasons were issued. There's also discussion in Bradshaw's Shareholders Guides warning the readers not to infer too much from the national numbers for travellers per class, stating that the definitions could arbitrarily change on some of the low-fare/high-volume commuter railways, and that this was enough to distort the numbers presented. In support of this I give you the North London Railway, which in 1855-1900 carried as many passengers as the Midland, but much less distance. Here Premium is first or second (plus seasons) compared to total revenue. Modern standards of consistency were not achieved across the companies accounts, I fear.

Another requirement was to include a system map. I apologise for going a bit off-topic, but it was the GCR's map that gave me the clearest idea of just how risky their London Extension was. There just doesn't look to be enough of the GCR to support a mainline to London. I've included the equivalent LYR map for comparison as another regional railway (viewed in say, 1880).

You've got to be paranoid when looking at revenue/ton (and, for that matter, revenue/passenger-journey). Several companies changed their definition in 1902/3 for their reports to the BoT of tonnage, but not of revenue. So the revenue/ton dramatically changes. The GCR changed in 1901/2, and the LYR, GWR, and LNWR (only the last shown) didn't over the short period I've so far looked at. Revenue/passenger-journey risks being dominated by the growth and collapse of (especially London) commuter services. You can see a blip in LNWR's overall numbers per passenger when it absorbed the Hampstead Junction Railway, but not in its overall revenue.

I've not looked at the GER, but overall each company was different, and also changed in different ways across the pre-Grouping period. You wouldn't have predicted from the early MS&L that it was going to be a coal-moving company as its largest business. As a generality the Northern companies had more freight and less passenger traffic, and the GER could be put in either. The dominant mineral was coal. Other than that it varies from company to company as to what they reported (prior to 1868). The MS&L reported only coal and stone, for instance, but the Midland was just 'Minerals'.

Complete agreement. For non-minerals the BoT published some schedules of maximum rates (National Archives reference RAIL 1053/192) under the headings shown below. Note the numbers of pages required for each class of merchandise. Minerals do not seem to have been regulated, and the spat between the MS&L, the GN, and the Midland in 1870 is informative on this. It also implies that the collieries may have had a stronger position than the producers of general merchandise. I also add an early LYR account that gives some average numbers.

I'm not so sure. The data below is still incomplete due to my laziness, but shows that minerals, general merchandise, and passenger (which includes mails, parcels, horses, dogs, & carriages) were all comparable*. Where there's data for individual companies (mostly pre-1868 - when the contents of the accounts became more standardised) the 'average' passenger & goods journey is quite short. "Overall" is BoT data for England and Wales.** The MS&L have the most useful accounts for challenging preconceptions, so I attach a fragment. * Except in the earliest days before about 1855 when passenger seems to dominate. ** They also give Scottish, Irish and UK, but there appear to be significant differences between the other nations and England/Wales including the amount of single-track, and the proportion of mixed passenger/goods trains (negligible in England & Wales).

Not true of the one I worked for due to the feared Ofwat Audit. Also if dividends were a factor the Dwr Cymru/Welsh Water would be the cheapest as it's not-for-profit. I note Thames Water hasn't paid a dividend recently, and isn't expecting to until (at least) 2030. I have water buts on the downcomers from my roofs. However, when full (all winter) they are bypassed to sewer. New, bigger, surface water sewers probably cost £200-£2000/metre (I'm out-of-date on this sort of cost) and no-one wants to have that sort of money spent on any system except the one that drains their own street.

Yes to the first point. No to the second point. I drove past Church Wilne WTW (Severn Trent) today on the M1 and it proudly advertised 50 glasses of potable water for 1p. What we have is cheap water and sewage treatment which we oldies resent because it used to be free (definition: buried in the fine print of council tax) and we therefore think that a water bill that is 10% of our energy bill is big. No. To get what we now want (better rivers, fewer sewage spills) it should probably be twice this, but would still be cheap. However, just as with renewable power, renewable water requires huge batteries (aka reservoirs) and we're reluctant to pay for them, or to have them constructed near us. Sigh.

@martin_wynne has (frivolously?) suggested terminating HS2 at Paddington. Well, yes. But it seems to me that it gives you same same problem as Euston, or St Pancras, or A.N.Other London mainline station. The depth at OOC is so far below local ground level (and train reversal at a terminus requires so many extra platforms) that you need to tunnel onwards to Paddington/Euston/St.Pancras/A.N. Other Low level OR to repeat St Pancras/KX Low Level, and tunnel further onwards (without the Metropolitan Widened Lines to help) to have 2 or 4 Platforms at the expensive 'terminus' and 8-12 at the real terminus at Tunbridge Wells/Guiildford/A.N.Other-Other true (cheaper) terminal destination.

Mostly yes, partly no. If you buy (say) French locomotives because they are either cheaper or better, or both, then every nut, bolt, spanner will need to be metric in their operation, maintenance and repair. Big irritation, moderate cost. The mantra from about 1900 onwards was standardisation to reduce cost-of-ownership, to which there was a great temptation, to which LMS and LNER both succumbed, to say 'Yes, and you must use these Standard modules we've developed as part of your design.'. Beyer Garratt seem to have been especially prone to building exactly what the customer specified -because they were willing to pay for it - rather than what was right for the customer's needs. So LMS and LNER didn't meddle with the articulated steam joints (no standard details available in-house), but did meddle with the engines that were receiving the steam.

Other direction. Possibly two anecdotes, both correct, telescoped into one? As with the LMS Garratts, what was needed was a from-first-principles design. What it got was a pair of 2-8-0 GNR engines put under a new boiler, probably before it was realised that the normal-duty sustained limit for a fireman is around 50 ft2, and that's pushing your luck. The LMS Garratts got a pair of Midland 0-6-0 engines, bodged to reduce axle loadings by adding a leading non-driving axle at each end. It is just soooo tempting to put existing engines to use instead of realising that a tank engine has to carry all its dead-weight, it can't delegate some of it to a (pair of) tenders.

A question and a "I wish I'd known that". The question is to ask what did the Midland (and the Great Northern and the Great Eastern, but not LNWR, LYR, GCR) changed in 1902 that saw them change the classification of about half of their 'Merchandise" into "Minerals"? This only affected the reports of tons carried, not income. As a result their Merchandise trade appears to soar in value/ton, falsely. The lessening of ignorance was that Hudson nearly drove the Midland into insolvency by buying other railways at fixed-interest that did not reflect their contribution to receipts. I just knew his honesty was highly questionable, not that his lust to spread his control nearly broke the Midland. In the worst half-year (1850 Jan-Jun) there was also a one-off £50,000 drop in passenger receipts with no corresponding drop in expenditure, and the Midland came within £60,000 of insolvency. The Midland grew its way out of these problems, but swept them under the carpet as well - changing the £90,000/year it paid to the Leeds & Bradford from line rental to guaranteed shares, then doing a fiddle where they only appeared to be paying 5%/year not the true 10%/year. In these numbers the operating margin is the total receipts minus the operating expenditure including taxes. The gradual decline 1845-1912 was industry-wide. The profit margin is the receipts minus operating, but also minus line rentals, fixed interest shares and debt servicing. It's what funded dividends, so you can see why the shareholders were not happy in 1850.

Yes. As a one-off running on fuel oil/coking byproducts. Then it could mimic the Southern Pacific cab-forwards which towed the fuel and water rather than pushed them. Not generally economic because this wasn't typically as cheap as coal.