Company Index

The pre-1923 British railway scene was very complex indeed because of the number of companies operating. In addition to pointing to the diagrams on which the routes of each company can be found, the table below will help to give some idea of the task facing a railway historian attempting to piece everything together. Besides all the companies, scores of joint committees existed to manage stations and routes where more than one company had an interest. The companies represented on these joint committees (as at the dates of the diagrams) are indicated in braces - if only one company appears in the braces, that company owned the other enterprise - for example the Midland Railway owned the Northern Counties Committee of Ireland.

See the notes below for general explanations and more information about asterisked companies in the table.

Notes

• The column headed "Group" indicates the fate of railways in England, Scotland and Wales at the Grouping. This gives a general guide - some lines at the margins of territory were dealt with differently. The codes used are:

  • GWR - became part of the Great Western Railway (W)

  • LMS - became part of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (M)

  • LNER - became part of the London and North Eastern Railway (E)

  • SR - became part of the Southern Railway (S)

  • LT - these lines in due course were absorbed into London Transport (not at Grouping, but later)

  • J followed by any of the initials in brackets above - joint between the railways indicated

  • Ind - remained independent.

• (Where there was no separate name for a joint committee, the diagram numbers appear next to the names of the constituent companies. e.g. The Great Eastern and Great Northern Railways jointly owned a line running northwards from Huntingdon - see diagram 5 etc. - and diagrams showing this line are indicated against the GER and the GNR.)

• Government and private dock and colliery lines, factory lines and tramways are not generally listed unless they offered opportunities for connection between other companies. (e.g. The Duke of Buccleuch's Railway on diagram 27 connected the Caledonian and North British lines at Granton, near Edinburgh, so it is listed above, whereas the Leith Harbour lines on the same diagram were only connected to the Caledonian, therefore didn't offer a through connection, and so are not listed above.) The purpose of this distinction is only to save space in the list above

• Irish railway companies have abbreviations which start "I-" but are given in the same alphabetical sequence as the other companies.

• *Avonmouth Light Railway - this remained independent at the Grouping, but was bought jointly by the GWR and LMS in 1926.

• *Cleobury Mortimer & Ditton Priors Light Railway - this was taken over by the GWR in January 1922, and so had already been absorbed before the Grouping.

• *Derwent Valley Light Railway - not only did this railway remain independent at Grouping, but it survived well into Nationalisation as well. Though cut back significantly in 1972, the remainder of the line continued open until 1980.

• *Forth Bridge Railway - (this answers a question posed during my introduction to the Railway Junction Diagrams!) The FBR was built to connect the NBR systems north and south of the Firth of Forth, and the NBR was granted the option to buy the railway, but never did. At Grouping, therefore it was an independent concern, and whilst it was clearly within the LNER ambit, the LNER didn't formally take it over either. When the railways were nationalised in 1948, it became part of British Railways.

• *Hull and Barnsley - this line was absorbed by the North Eastern Railway a few months before the NER in turn became a constituent of the LNER.

• *Kilsyth and Bonnybridge Railway - before the Grouping, this was a nominally independent railway, though services were operated on effectively a joint line basis by the Caledonian and North British. It became a formal joint line at the Grouping, operated by the LMS and LNER. The route did not survive into British Railways days, being closed in 1935.

• *Lancashire and Yorkshire - The L&Y didn't reach Grouping as an independent entity, having merged with the LNWR at the start of 1922.

• *Liverpool Overhead Railway - not only did this railway remain independent at Grouping, but it survived into Nationalisation as well. The line was closed at the end of 1956.

• *South Eastern and Chatham - this was an arrangement between the London Chatham and Dover Railway and the South Eastern Railway. The result on the Railway Junction Diagrams is that some diagrams which formerly showed junctions between the SER and LCDR continued to appear, though all the lines on them were coloured the same! The diagram of Dover (033) is a good example of this. Presumably, these diagrams continued to appear since there was a possibility (albeit extremely remote) that these two companies may have resumed their independent existences. In the event, the 1923 Grouping rendered the question academic.

• West London Railway - though an independent concern, this railway was jointly leased by the LNWR and GWR from 1855 onwards, and after grouping this arrangement continued with the GWR and LMS. The line became part of British Railways on nationalisation in 1948.

I am indebted to Christopher Awdry's Encyclopaedia of British Railway Companies, published by Patrick Stephens Ltd for some of the information above about what happened to several of the companies at the Grouping. If you want to find out more about this subject, I unhesitatingly recommend this book to you.

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The Railway Junction Diagrams shown here are taken from a 1920 edition, which is old enough to be out of copyright (a fact taken advantage of by at least two publishers who have already reprinted books of Diagrams from 1914 and 1915). If the Diagrams look less than perfect, this is because the book from which these images were taken has previously been in regular use, and so some images contain hand-written annotations from the original owner, as well as the finger marks you'd expect of any book in regular use on a real railway, not to mention the yellowing of age (though I have tried to correct for this). Follow the link to the introduction if you would like to know more about this fascinating and unique source of railway history. NB: Although the original book from which these images were taken is out of copyright (so that if you own one of these books yourself, you also can make and publish images from it) these images that I have made are protected by copyright. If you want to understand this clearly, there are links below that you can follow.

When it is finished, this site will include almost 180 Railway Junction Diagrams, and naturally this will take some time to complete. If the one you're looking for isn't here yet, please bookmark this site and have another look in the future. For a quick indication of what has been included, have a look at the Diagram Index page - only diagrams which have been uploaded appear in that index in detail. You could always email me  if you'd like to encourage me to give priority to the inclusion of a particular diagram.

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