In the second of a series on the railway plans we hold at Dorset History Centre, Colin Divall, emeritus professor of Railway Studies at the University of York, describes why the railway plans are such an important source of information.
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Building railways meant land, and land meant property. By the 1830s, when mainline railways were first planned in Dorset, virtually all the county was already divided up into estates. Some were large like the Bankes’ 16,000 acres, spread across much of east Dorset and Purbeck, while others, particularly in the west, were more modest. But large or small, landowners valued their property, and railways represented both an opportunity and a threat. For a hitherto remote and predominantly agricultural county, railways might open up profitable food markets in London and further afield. On the other hand, railways cut through estates, farms and fields, disrupting established work patterns and perhaps even spoiling the view from the great house!
So, every railway promoter was obliged to convince parliament that on balance the good outweighed the bad – at least from the point of view of the landed gentry and industrialists who sat in parliament. A statutory railway company was an unusual entity. It had the legal power to buy the land it needed, which in a society firmly based on land ownership was a rare privilege indeed. Parliament therefore wanted to be sure that a railway was not only practical engineering but also likely to be commercially viable. And above all, it wanted to know whose land was going to be affected.
This is where these diagrams come in. They detailed how a railway would cut through town and country, both in the horizontal plane (plans) and the vertical (sections). Every single plot of affected land had to be given, along with adjacent infrastructure like parish roads and turnpikes. Separate books of reference gave the owners and occupiers of each numbered plot. These plans and sections don’t cover the whole of Dorset, just the bands through which railways were promoted. But for those areas they provide us with the most comprehensive and generally accurate information we are ever likely to have about who owned what and where.
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This is part two of an eight part series of blogs on the work we are doing to conserve the railway plans.
You might be interested to know that I used some of the Dorset plans in my book ‘The World’s First Railway System’ (Oxford, 2009) I visited the Record Office c.2006. At that time many of the plans were in a very poor condition. A lot were reported as unfit for production. I was carefully watched while I consulted the first batch of plans that were produced. I was then told that I was behaving very responsibly and that I could look at some other plans if I agreed to do so under formal supervision.
You might also be interested to know that a distinguished economic historian, the late Philip Cottrell of Leicester University, was very keen on Dorset and the LSWR, and had a good collection of model kits of LSWR locomotives, which were subsequently sold through SAS Auctions, Newbury on behalf of his widow.
Hi Mark, thank-you for that information! Most of them now have had some degree of conservation work done on them, so are perhaps much more accessible than they might have been before! You know where they are if you ever want to have a look at them again!