Midland Railway

The Midland Railway was one of the largest of the pre-Grouping companies, headquartered at Derby, where it also kept its principal locomotive, carriage, and wagon works. Its London terminus was St Pancras, whose train shed and adjoining hotel remain among the most familiar railway buildings in Britain. The Midland was known less for the size of its engines than for the way it worked them, and the practices it settled on before 1923 shaped the early years of the London Midland and Scottish Railway and, through it, much of what became the London Midland Region of British Railways.

The small engine policy

The Midland is best remembered for what became known as its “small engine policy”. Rather than build large, powerful locomotives to take heavy trains single-handed, the company preferred smaller engines worked hard, and it accepted the cost of double-heading the heaviest expresses with two locomotives instead of one. This suited a railway that ran frequent, moderately loaded trains and that had graded its operating rules around modestly sized machines. The policy had far-reaching consequences: it was carried into the new LMS at the 1923 Grouping by Midland men who took senior positions in the combined company, and it delayed the arrival of larger express types on former Midland routes until the design thinking of the group changed later in the 1920s.

Locomotives

The signature Midland express design was the compound 4-4-0, a three-cylinder engine using one high-pressure and two low-pressure cylinders. Developed on the Midland and later built in quantity by the LMS, these compounds became a British Railways Class 4P and worked secondary express and semi-fast trains across the London Midland Region into the 1950s. Alongside them the Midland relied on large numbers of smaller 4-4-0s, 0-6-0 goods engines, and tank locomotives, a fleet that reflected the same preference for numerous modest machines over a few large ones. Class histories are set out in the RCTS Locomotives of the LMS series.

Livery

The Midland painted its locomotives in a rich crimson lake, widely known as “Midland red”, which it applied not only to engines but also to its coaching stock. When the LMS adopted a similar red as its standard, the Midland shade was the direct ancestor of what most people came to call LMS maroon. That colour survived the 1948 nationalisation in modified form: the crimson lake later chosen for British Railways coaching stock traces its line of descent back through LMS maroon to the Midland original. The story of the colour is followed on the British Railways maroon page.

The Settle and Carlisle

The Midland’s most celebrated engineering achievement was the Settle to Carlisle line, opened for passenger traffic in 1876. Built to give the company its own main-line route to Scotland independent of its rivals, it runs for some seventy miles across the high Pennine country of the northern dales, carried on long viaducts and through tunnels driven at considerable cost in money and labour. Ribblehead viaduct is the best known of its structures. The line remains among the great main-line engineering works in Britain and is still open today.

Grouping and after

Under the Railways Act 1921 the Midland became a constituent of the London Midland and Scottish Railway at the 1923 Grouping, where its officers and its methods carried great weight in the early years of the new company. On nationalisation in 1948 the former Midland lines passed to the London Midland Region of British Railways. See the full list of pre-Grouping companies in the constituents index.