Midland Railway

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This article is about the historical British railway company. For other uses see Midland Railway (disambiguation)

The Midland Railway (MR) was a railway company in the United Kingdom, which existed from 1844 to 1922. It was formed in 1844 by the merger of the Midland Counties Railway, the North Midland Railway, and the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway.

The Midland owned a large network of railway lines centred on the East Midlands, and its head office was in Derby. The MR's main line, known unsurprisingly as the Midland Main Line, connected the East Midlands to London St Pancras station and to Sheffield Midland station. The company also owned the main lines connecting the East Midlands to Birmingham and Bristol, and to Manchester. In the 1870s a dispute with the London and North Western Railway over access rights to the LNWR line to Scotland caused the MR to construct the Settle and Carlisle (S&C) line, the highest main line in England, in order to secure the company's access to Scotland; ironically the dispute with the LNWR was settled before the S&C was built, but Parliament refused to allow the MR to withdraw from the project. It also owned a number of less important lines, and in partnership with the Great Northern Railway it owned the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway to provide connections from the Midlands to East Anglia; the M&GN was the UK's biggest joint railway system.

The Midland pioneered the use gas lighting of trains in Britain, put third-class carriages on all its trains in 1872, and abolished second class in 1875, giving third class passengers the level of comfort formerly afforded to second class passengers (elsewhere some third class passengers travelled in open wagons) and introduced the first British Pullman supplementary-fare cars. The non-contiguous numbering of classes, with 1st and 3rd class only, continued until 1956, when third class was renamed second.

The company was grouped into the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) on January 1, 1923 and was the most influential of the pre-grouping companies that formed the LMS.

See also locomotives of the Midland Railway.

External links

• Midland Railway Society

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Major constituent railway companies of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway:

Caledonian | Furness | Lancashire & Yorkshire | Glasgow & South Western | London and North Western | Midland | North Staffordshire (Full list of constituents)