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| Introduction
a Fascinating and Unique Resource for Historians of Rail |
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| Introduction
a Fascinating and Unique Resource for Historians of Rail |
The Railway Clearing House (RCH) Maps and Junction Diagrams are among the most fascinating source materials for British railway historians. These documents date from the time when the railways of Britain were run not as a single network, but as competing enterprises.
Although laws from the mid-1800's required newly-built railways to connect to existing railways wherever practicable, thus building up a network, like many well-intentioned pieces of legislation, this did not lead to complete co-operation between the multiplicity of companies. Where railways met, and through-running was possible, the question arose of how much the company operating the train should pay the company whose tracks were being used. When there were more than two companies involved, such a question became even more complex. The RCH was created to deal with such matters.
The RCH published maps of the railways, details of the working arrangements between the companies, and, relevant to these pages, diagrams of the junctions, annotated with measurements. Although these are essentially schematic diagrams, they are drawn with an eye on the true geography of the locations they describe, and in consequence, they can explain many puzzling features of modern railway layouts, as well as helping one to imagine how long-lost installations may have appeared. For example:
Since the time these Railway Junction Diagrams were drawn up, not only have most of the railway companies been first grouped into four large concerns, then nationalised into one - British Railways, but many of the duplicated lines which were the result of the original competition between the companies have disappeared.
As well as answering questions, and shedding light into darkness, the diagrams sometimes give rise to questions, such as:
Some junction diagrams were very simple, and one might wonder why they needed to be the subject of official scrutiny - such as the following extract from diagram 123, which deals with some Irish railways. The junction was at the joint Castlewellan station, so everything on one side of the station belonged to one company, and everything on the other side to the other.
On the other hand, some diagrams contain a sufficient amount of complexity to make one wonder how the railways coped - and on top of that, how the customers did. Suppose a customer in Leeds was going to pick up a parcel which had been sent from London. Which of the many goods and passenger stations shown on this extract from diagram 40 would he have to go to?
Fortunately, the different colours used to designate the different companies are always identified on each diagram, so the key required to decode the map extract above is as follows - from which it may be seen that the complexity above is partly illusory - there were actually only five companies involved at Leeds, not the nine (ignoring the Monkbridge Iron Works lines) that counting the different colour schemes might have suggested:
Although the RCH continued to produce maps and junction diagrams after the 1923 grouping, there was much less variety on them, because the main influence behind which companies were grouped into each of the "Big Four" was geography, and thus companies operating in the same areas were grouped. Whilst the junctions persisted, the issue of revenue transfer often disappeared, since many junctions which had been frontiers were no longer so. In addition, the grouping brought rationalisation - routes which had been duplicated or triplicated were in the new context just a drain on resources, and so line closures were inevitable, and took place from the 1920's onwards. Undoubtedly, the most interesting period for these maps is before 1923.
The RCH Junction Diagrams are a resource which deserves to be more widely known. I was extremely pleased when I discovered them, and I hope you will be too.
The images of the diagrams and the other materials presented at this web-site are derived from my own personal copy of the maps as issued in 1920. This was given to me as a birthday gift by my wife in 1990. (My wife always works hard at doing something special for my birthday - much more so than I do for hers, I'm ashamed to admit. That she scoured the kingdom for this book is nothing out of the ordinary. I have to say, though, that much as I treasure this book, I probably treasure even more the birthday card that she arranged for me in 1994, which she managed to get signed by all of the members of the sporting team I have supported ever since 1973 - the Warwickshire County Cricket Club. Though the events are now receding into history, Warwickshire reached such a peak of performance in the middle 1990's that their achievements - particularly in the year they won the County Championship, the Sunday League, and one of the two knockout competitions - losing in the final of the other - are unlikely ever to be matched. But, I digress, this page is about railway diagrams, not cricket, so let's get back on track!)
I first encountered the diagrams in about 1987 in a book that was a reprint of the 1915 set made by David & Charles, publishers of many fine titles on railway and canal history and related subjects. The book was in my local public library, but I had overlooked it on previous visits because it wasn't on the shelf one might have expected. Well, I borrowed it and renewed it a number of times, gleaning all sorts of incredible information from its busy pages. Seeing me poring over it evening after evening is probably what convinced my wife to seek out a copy for me. After a while, I discovered that Ian Allan had also reprinted the collection, a slightly different collection from D&C, being based on the maps as they stood in 1914. At the time, that was also unavailable for purchase in the shops for some reason or other.
Some time after that, one of my friends gave me a photocopy of the 1928 set of diagrams (including the 1931 amendments). Unfortunately, the photocopy was in black and white, and seemed also to be a copy of a copy rather than a copy of an original, so it was pretty hard to make out which company was which, because most were the same shade of black! Not only that, but as noted above, after 1923, the diagrams that remained were much less colourful (or at least, I imagine they were). Post-Grouping diagrams came into the hands of the General public rather more easily than pre-Grouping ones. However, with the removal of the diagrams that were no longer needed because they covered places where everything was now under the same management, the number of diagrams fell from the 158 of pre-Grouping days to a mere 116. Another thing that happened at almost the same time as the Grouping was the creation of the Irish Free State, and one might imagine that places like Dublin would no longer appear, but in fact, that would be a false assumption - Dublin is still there in the 1928 edition, renumbered from diagram 118 to 15.
When I was given the book, I was over the moon! It didn't matter that some of the pages are extremely grubby. It didn't matter that various of its previous owners and users had written on a number of the diagrams (especially not as the handwriting was of its era and very reminiscent of that of my late father, who had been born in 1908). Those were all signs that the set of diagrams had done real work on the railway. I was a little disappointed to discover that some of the diagrams were missing (99, 118, 129 and half (!)of 83). On the other hand, there were three copies of diagram 157 (two dated 1914 and one dated 1911), and then after what should have been the final diagram, number 158, a series of twenty sheets had been bound in and individually numbered by the book's previous owners all the way up to 178 - of these, number 169 explains what happened to number 83: that map was reissued . Add to that a completely different plan stuck inside the back cover (which might help to identify where the book was originally in use) which I have included at this web site as a special bonus map associated with diagram 77. As if all those features were not enough, there was also in the front of the book a thirty three page section dated 1913 detailing joint lines and shared running powers, accompanied by a four page amendment list to that section dated 1915. Railway historian heaven!
A couple of years later, I discovered a second hand copy of the Ian Allan reprint (ISBN 0 7110 1256 3) and immediately snapped it up, so that I would have a complete set of diagrams.
Then, one day, in summer 1995, I was at Collector's Corner near Euston station, rummaging round their eclectic collection of stuff that ranges from jewels to (let's be honest here) rubbish - though of course, rubbish isn't that if you want it. I found a drawer full of loose copies of half a dozen diagrams, and spotted the dates on them: 1912, 1914 and some 1922! 1922!?! Well, obviously I didn't have the 1922 ones, but could they or the others be the ones missing from my collection - a long shot, but worth the few quid chance. And guess what! The 1922-dated maps do indeed plug the gaps in the collection. (The others duplicated what I already had, so I gave them away.)
So here, then, is what I surmise the history of this set of diagrams is. Clearly enough, it is a set that has been modified over a period of years and was bound in its present form some time after 1920, which is the last identifiable date for any change in content. It will have carried on in real railway use past 1920, ceasing to be useful in the day-to-day management of the railway in 1923, when most of the companies described in the book died, and four new ones were born. By that stage, it appears that the 1922 supplement had been issued, and the owner of the diagrams had removed the pages that were to be replaced, but had not yet bound in the 1922 supplement. Perhaps one of the railway employees kept the book as a souvenir after the 1923 Grouping. At any event, from that time to 1990, I have no knowledge of whose shelves it was sitting on, gathering dust and yellowing as it mellowed with age - well, other than to say I have had it for over a decade now, and it is still apparent when you open it up (if you have a sensitive nose) that at least one previous owner was either a heavy smoker, or lived in a house with a coal fire, or most likely both. All right then, to the big question, where was this book used? Well, I reckon there's a good chance that place was Pemberton, near Wigan. In those days (see diagram 77) Pemberton was the kind of place where you needed a copy of the diagrams, because there was a complicated little set of junctions there where the Lancashire and Yorkshire joined up with the London and North Western. Moreover, the bonus map I have included, the map showing railway access to Pemberton Colliery, not only adds to that suggestion, but it also carries an annotation suggesting local knowledge. On top of that, diagram 77 does seem to have been consulted more than average. Another thing that adds to my hunch is that the L & Y and the LNWR did start to work together slightly in advance of the grouping, which might explain why the 1922 update seems to have been frozen in time in this collection.) So that's my educated guess: Pemberton (or Wigan, perhaps, if it was in a slightly more significant location).
The images of diagrams presented at this site are prepared from this unique and exciting composite historical document. I have left my own mark on it now, by binding in those three serendipitous finds from Collector's Corner, making this collection just about the latest possible snapshot of the pre-Grouping scene.
There are clear differences, fortunately, so you don't need to be an expert to be able to tell the two apart. Although I started this journey with the D&C edition, I'm no longer living in the same place, so I no longer have access to that edition (assuming that it's still there in the library at all) so the comments here are based on a comparison of the originals and the Ian Allan reprint. I'm not going to spend much time on the question of yellowing of paper and so on - all that kind of stuff can be expertly forged, by someone with the relevant skills.
| The first difference and the most obvious one is that the reprints are on both sides of somewhat thinner paper. The original maps were only printed on one side - the right hand side, as the book is open before you. That's why the diagram number appears at the top right - it is on the outside edge, as you would expect, in the original, but all the even numbered pages in the reprint have the number in the spine of the book. | ||||||
| The second difference and one of great importance to people who are
interested in such things concerns the printing method. In the
originals, the engravings (which were done by J P and W R Emslie) were
printed in the lithography process by the firm McCorquodale's, also
noted as printers of other select items, including some pieces of paper
that you could spend. The process involved a separate printing operation
for each of the colours used, because each was a pure colour - sometimes
this is called spot colour printing. Thus, to produce the splendid diagram
1, Carlisle, separate printing operations were required for the
orange, red, violet, pink, green, blue, yellow and black. On the other
hand, the reprints have been produced using a more modern process
requiring only four separate operations, to print in cyan, magenta,
yellow and black. Any colours other than those (and in the case of the
RJD's, that's everything apart from the yellow and the black) are
produced by mixing them. The way the colours are mixed is by printing a
pattern of dots, called a screen. These dots are big enough to overlap,
and the inks used are slightly transparent, so that the effect from
normal viewing distances is that they merge to create the illusion of
the colours required. But the problem is that generally speaking, the
newer method of printing produces colours that lack the life and bite of
the older ones - that's why one of the colours is black, to try to pep
up the contrast and make the colours look sharper and brighter. So,
comparing the red and orange in diagram 1,
they are easy to tell apart in the original, both being pure colours,
but in the reprint, they are much more similar, both being mixtures of
yellow and magenta in differing proportions.
If you think through what I've said about the printing processes, you'll realise that whichever one is used, there is always the problem of registration - that is of aligning the paper and printing equipment so that each new layer of colour goes onto the right place on the paper. Of course, randomness happens, and the colours sometimes don't get laid down properly for one reason or another. That causes a registration error, and because of the differences between the processes, the effects of the registration errors are quite different, as illustrated here.
So, in summary, the originals are printed by a process that produced sharper images and truer colours. Even a good quality print using the 4-colour method will always look poorer than the quality of a print using a spot colour process (that's not a comment on the quality of IA's work at all - it's as inevitable as the difference between making coffee with fresh or powdered milk: if you are one of those individuals to whom this matters, you can tell, and you can tell straight away.) Just as a dot screen image looks less crisp than a spot colour image, so scanning in that image will also introduce a further level of degradation into the image. A second-generation image would look distinctly blurred, even at normal viewing distances. |
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The third difference is only applicable to some of the diagrams, and
it's downright peculiar. Some diagrams have had pretty significant
colour changes or changes of shading applied to them. A good number of
diagrams have glaring changes like this, but I'll just show an excerpt
from one of them, to make the point.
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This last item probably gives you a real insight into why I have this ongoing fascination with these diagrams: for any railway historians this book will provide lots of answers to questions that they may have wanted to explore, but in the act of exploration, new questions rise to the surface and demand to be answered.
At the moment I am writing this, in 2001, the protection afforded by copyright runs for 70 years, When you start counting that 70 years will depend on precisely what type of work you are talking about, and how that work was produced, but in the case of things like the Railway Junction Diagrams, that time starts from the date of publication. Thus, all the gems mentioned here are out of copyright (though if I were contemplating publishing the 1931 amendments, which I am not, I would wait until 2002). However, a complication arises in the case of the reprints made by D&C and IA. It is not clear to me (I'm not a lawyer, though unfortunately due to a violation of my personal copyright relating to the material at this web-site, I have needed to consult one in order to stop that violation) what would and would not be covered by copyright, and when (since the reprints do not carry their own publication dates) that cover would apply from. As for the images appearing at this website, the publication of these images in an electronic machine-readable form is a completely new form of publishing, and copyright in all the images I have made remains with me, just like any other photograph I might make. (As for the enlargements from the IA reprint that appear above, I would expect those to be covered by the provisions in copyright law made for "fair use and comment" about those images, whatever the position truly is about the reprints, besides which neither of the graphics shown comprises more than a tiny fraction of a single page.) And of course, the exciting, informative, witty, (all right, I'll stop) text that accompanies these images is entirely my own creation based on extensive research of many kinds. Please respect my copyright and observe the acceptable use policy for this web-site.
For the sake of consistency and to make it easier for people who might want to print these diagrams out, all images are presented in portrait mode (even though most in the book are landscape) , with the map scaled to a size of 650 pixels along the short edge. You'll see these best in 800x600 resolution. The images are in JPEG format, with a compression factor of 60%, which results in most image files being smaller than 90 kilobytes. If the Internet ever gets significantly faster, I'll produce some much higher resolution versions.
| Diagram Index | Passenger Station Index | Company Index | Diagram 1 |
Click here for my general railways
page
Click here
for my historical railways page
| 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. |
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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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This page is a part of Chris Tolley's web-site. Latest update: Friday, July 13, 2001 05:41 |
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