As highlighted on The Study page, with its detailed, atlas-style maps of the district’s railways, mapping is a crucial resource in railway history and a good aid to informing readers with less familiarity of the details of the local railway infrastructure. The first paragraphs here are a scoping statement for work underway or planned in the Study, and they identify key sources. Further maps, both from official sources and freshly-drawn, will appear in detailed papers under the History page and elsewhere.
Early days
As the early railway companies implemented their authorised projects, some cartographers, map publishers and map-sellers were keen to keep up with and even anticipate routes yet to be approved and which sometimes failed or adopted other alignments. Railway routes were sometimes added to maps that were intended primarily for other purposes, such as showing administrative areas and landed estates. County or shire maps were often the sensible places on which to show long-distance railways.
For Dorset, the Southampton & Dorchester Railway was naturally an early entrant, and even appeared with a projected but not implemented direct branch to Weymouth from near Moreton, avoiding Dorchester. Such maps were lavishly decorated, with fine engraving, sets of armorials, scenic vignettes and abbey seals – all probably courting establishment approval.
The emerging railway companies and regulatory agencies were quick to produce their own maps for bureaucratic reasons and to facilitate traffic flows and exchanges between companies and connecting lines. These varied in style and content but were usually of high cartographic quality.
The Railway Clearing House produced some of the earliest maps of railway networks in order to show the connections and convergences of the lines of the pre-Grouping companies, using different colours.
The Midland Railway’s maps were arguably better and certainly more detailed than the RCH maps, albeit not coloured. As a partner in the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway, the MR had maps covering as far south as Wimborne Junction and Broadstone Junction, but also indicating running powers into Wimborne, Poole and Bournemouth West.
Utility of key mapping sources
The larger-scale map series produced by the civil engineers, land surveyors and cartographers in railway companies are generally the most accurate and reliable. The Ordnance Survey (OS) 1:2,500 (and sometimes 1:1,250 and 1:500 in urban areas) are the next most useful, dating from the late 19th Century. They are not always entirely reliable for railway history purposes, perhaps because the surveyors and cartographic draughtsmen (rarely women until more recent times) were not always familiar with railway infrastructure features such as track layouts.
Upping the scales
Mapped data used in our study has depended on the availability of large-scale historic maps and plans:
• The original Parliamentary plans, deposited by emerging railway companies as part of the effort to secure authorising Acts, are helpful in determining land ownership extent, together with the associated ‘Books of Reference’ listing ownerships of land parcels within the railway corridor. They are less reliable as evidence of the alignments actually constructed, since there was an allowance for deviation on either side, or companies sometimes took liberties without seeking further authorisation.
• The survival of railway company plans of lines during their operating lives is more patchy, especially with former Southern Railway items, as many seem to have perished in the bombing of Waterloo Station in World War Two. Also, railway company/committee minutes that recorded new infrastructure works usually referred to detailed plans that may have become separated from files, or not been retained, or become lost.
* With the OS, availability of the larger scales is generally complete, copies being held in the major archives, libraries and by the OS itself (or franchised agencies). In the case of Wimborne Station and surroundings, editions of the 1:2,500 scale exist at survey dates for at least 1888 (the earliest), 1900 (near the peak of development), 1927 (prior to 1933’s rationalisation) and 1936 (much as surviving until closure to passengers).
• As most land taken by the railways had belonged to major landed estates, plans originating from those estates can be helpful. They offer information about pre-railway land ownership and land management practices that affected railway construction and operations. Tithe maps often coincided with the early railway promotion in the 1830s and 1840s, and took account of farm land acquired for railway construction. These categories (except tithe maps) can also be difficult to discover or at least to access. In general, landed estate archives are well organised, detailed and mostly surviving, but tracing them can be difficult where they have been inherited and perhaps relocated, unless passed to record offices or to museums. Some landed families or their successors may be also reluctant to allow access for research.
• Not all proposed railway schemes reached the stage of formal deposition of plans with Parliament. Approximate alignments might have appeared in prospectuses, preliminary surveys, etc. before schemes were abandoned for various reasons, including lack of political and financial support. Maps showing these may be more difficult to discover, or might have been lost, binned or destroyed. While such schemes are by their nature perhaps ultimately less interesting than those that reached Parliament, and especially those that were built, they are nevertheless part of the full history of railway expansion and deserve greater exposure. Early ideas may well have been the precursors of schemes that succeeded. There are undoubtedly examples in East Dorset, known or yet to be discovered.
The railways built across East Dorset passed through numerous substantial estates, with owners normally involved at least in the early stages – perhaps supporting or objecting to proposals, negotiating alignments to protect their properties, gaining benefits such as private sidings, superior civil engineering or architecture, sitting on provisional committees, even becoming company directors. Examples include Baron de Mauley and Guest (from 1846) at Canford, the Earls of Shaftesbury, the Hanhams at Wimborne.
Combining sources
Assembly of the full railway infrastructure picture from mapping often requires reconciliation of these different sources, and deeper digging to resolve anomalies and bottom-out mysteries. The atlas-style maps used here (see The Study page) were based partly on the land terrier of the former British Railways Property Board, which generally shows land transactions superimposed by hand on the civil engineer’s printed plans (the so-called 2-chain plans). The base plans mostly dated from the early 1920s, prepared in the run-up to the 1923 Grouping of the earlier railway companies into the ‘Big Four’. These show most infrastructure of the time – tracks, signals, bridges, crossings, etc.
A local exception is a copy held of the Salisbury & Dorset Junction line terrier, which shows no railway infrastructure, instead the situation at the dates of the original land parcel acquisitions, with subsequent land transactions recorded. This is useful in establishing previous land ownership (not surprisingly, many of the estate owners became early directors of the railway companies), but less helpful in identifying where infrastructure was installed by the opening date and subsequently.
Courtesy: Museum of East Dorset
