The London Midland and Scottish Railway was formed at the 1923 Grouping and was the largest of the Big Four. For a time it was the largest joint-stock company in the world, with a route network reaching from London to the far north of Scotland and a locomotive fleet numbered in the thousands. It carried the greatest single share of Britain’s railway traffic through the 1920s and 1930s, and on nationalisation in 1948 it was divided between the new London Midland and Scottish regions of British Railways.
Constituents at the Grouping
The LMS was assembled from several of the largest pre-Grouping companies. Its principal English constituents were the London and North Western Railway, the Midland Railway, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, which had already merged with the LNWR in 1922. In Scotland it took in the Caledonian Railway, the Glasgow and South Western Railway, and the Highland Railway. Two smaller English companies, the Furness Railway and the North Staffordshire Railway, completed the principal list, alongside a number of jointly owned and subsidiary lines.
Big engine against small engine
The early LMS was marked by a tension between the traditions of its two largest English constituents. The London and North Western Railway had favoured large, powerful locomotives, while the Midland Railway had built and worked its traffic around smaller engines run in pairs when needed, a practice usually called the small engine policy. Midland men held much of the senior management in the company’s first years, and the small engine outlook dominated for a time. The results were increasingly ill suited to the heaviest express work, and by the early 1930s the company was ready for a decisive change of direction in its locomotive affairs.
The Stanier fleet
The arrival of William Stanier as Chief Mechanical Engineer transformed the LMS fleet. Under his direction the company produced the Coronation, or Princess Coronation, Pacifics, often known as the Duchess class, for the heaviest London to Glasgow expresses; the Jubilee 4-6-0s for secondary express work; the Black Five mixed-traffic 4-6-0s that could turn their hand to almost any duty; and the 8F 2-8-0 heavy freight engines. These classes were built at the company’s principal works at Crewe, Derby, and Horwich, and many remained in front-line service throughout British Railways days. The Black Five in particular became one of the most numerous and widely travelled classes on the system, and its story is told on the Black Five feature.
The Stanier classes standardised much of the LMS fleet, but a great deal of older pre-Grouping and early LMS machinery survived in secondary and local work into the 1950s and beyond. Class histories and construction details are set out in the RCTS Locomotives of the LMS series.
Into British Railways
On 1 January 1948 the LMS became the London Midland Region of the nationalised British Railways, which inherited the bulk of the company’s English network and its headquarters tradition centred on Euston and Derby. The former LMS lines in Scotland passed instead to the new Scottish Region, so that the company’s territory was split along the border rather than kept whole. Standard LMS livery choices carried forward too: the lined maroon that British Railways later adopted for its principal express passenger engines drew directly on LMS practice, and is discussed on the BR maroon feature. A fuller list of the Big Four companies and their successor regions is given in the constituents index.
- Awdry, C. (1990) Encyclopaedia of British Railway Companies, PSL, London Midland and Scottish section.
- RCTS Locomotives of the LMS series, for class histories and construction details.
- Ian Allan ABC of British Railways Locomotives, Combined Volume, for the 1960 allocation snapshot.