The Midland Railway

In March of 1994, the state government of Western Australia closed the Government Railway Workshop at Midland, amidst widespread community outrage. This volume records the history of this important industrial facility.

David Maidment has unravelled the complex history of the Johnson, Deeley and Fowler 4-4-0 locomotives of the Midland Railway and its LMS successor, covering their design, construction, operation and performance in this book with over 400 black and white photographs. It recounts their working on the Midland main lines from St Pancras to Derby, Manchester, Leeds and Carlisle, the latter via the celebrated Settle & Carlisle line, and the later work of the Fowler LMS engines on the West Coast main line. The book also describes the history of the Midland 4-4-0s built for the Somerset & Dorset and Midland & Great Northern Railways. The book covers the period from the first Midland 4-4-0 built in 1876 to the last LMS 2P withdrawn in 1962 and includes performance logs, weight diagrams and dimensions and statistical details of each locomotive.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.