Journal 49 — Summer 2012

Table of Contents

  • Lincoln Chief Goods Clerk: 48 Years of Railway Work / By Tony Wall
  • Ripley Station: Its Railway-Triggered Boom / By John Slack
  • Johnson 0–6–0 No. 1445 / By Peter Witts
  • Normanton Station in 1840 / By Gerry Firth
  • Centre Spread: The Iron Bridge Over the River Trent
  • Colourful Midland Railway Tickets / By Roy Burrows
  • Snippets from the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent / By Andrew Surry
  • Query Corner
  • Comments on Items in Previous Journals
  • Front cover

    Front cover

    The cover photograph reflects on a fact of Lincoln life that has bedevilled its citizens for more than 150 years. Our article on the life of Mr. William Nicholson, one time Chief Goods Clerk for the Midland Railway at Lincoln, reveals the complexity of the problem.

    Lincoln was notorious for the delays caused by the two sets of level crossings on the High Street; one at the Midland’s St. Mark’s station, and the other at the Great Northern station, a little closer to the centre of the town. Mark Warrick took this photograph of the one at St Mark’s, catching a lull in the traffic so that the level crossing gates and the down platform buildings are in the shot. When the gates were closed to traffic, as was often the case, the build-up of traffic was very considerable.

    After St. Mark’s closed in 1985, services that used to terminate here have to cross High Street at the other level crossing to get to Central (on the site of the old Great Northern station). So, although there is now only one crossing in the High Street, more trains have to cross it.

    [Courtesy of Mark Warrick: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frmark/5369912134/]

  • Rear cover

    Rear cover

    Your Editor photographed this large Midland Railway poster in September 2010 whilst it was hanging, in its frame, in the restricted section of the Midland Railway Study Centre. It shows a typical MR map of the system around which there are pictures of notable places in the cities that the Midland served. Most of these are places to which tourists would naturally gravitate, like the Houses of Parliament in London and the waterfront at Liverpool. However, the designer of this poster chose the new station at Leicester to denote that town, it then being the only one identified by the Midland’s own building. That suggests that the date was soon after the new station came into service, a little after 1895. One vignette, the only one not of a town, shows the Forth bridge, of which the Midland provided one quarter of the finances and had a quarter share. It was opened in 1890.