NEW AUGUST 2022.  What you get here are the complete contents of a folder which was purchased from a second-hand shop for £2. It is foolscap in size with thick card covers, containing sheets of good-quality heavy gauge paper.

The title written on the front is ‘Railway Exchange Junctions’. It also bears a monogram, presumably representing the person who compiled it all.

It deals with the exchange of goods traffic between the Big Four railway companies, and appears to have been compiled early in the Second World War. Every place where this hand-over occured is listed. In East Anglia that includes Temple Mills, Peterborough East, Peterborough North, Ilford, Hitchin, Bourne and Lincoln. Loose in the folder are three pages held together with a very rusty pin. They list all the exchange points, and for both directions record the “Max. number of wagons exchanged weekly 21 Jan-6 Feb 1941”.

The main part of the folder is the system maps supplied by the four railways, each one glued to a page then carefully concertina-folded to fit. All have the transfer locations underlined in a green crayon. The maps have been digitised with a camera, and the two SR ones were so wide their image had to be ‘stitched’ from a pair of overlapping pictures. Unavoidably therefore there is some overall distortion, but if you zoom in sufficiently you should find their detail clear.

These maps must have been produced at various times in the 1930’s. The three from the LNER (north, south and London area) are quite mundane, resembling the ones used in their timetables. The GWR have a more impressive offering, consisting of seven sectional maps including ones of their lines in the Birmingham and Bristol areas. The LMS similarly have eight maps, possibly the most artistic ones complete with representations of hilly areas in brown. The SR have an extremely wide map of their whole system from Cornwall to Dover plus one showing their suburban lines.

There are three bonus maps also present. One is of the London Underground. A second is a hand-drawn sketch of the railways around Plymouth, tucked in a pocket right at the back. The third is a GWR map showing their interests in Ireland, not there in the folder in its own right but found on the back of another map.

Who compiled all this information, and why? We don’t know, but clearly it was not done by an amateur but by a professional with access to the information. A guess is that he was a railwayman by upbringing, but was now working for the government as part of the war effort, perhaps in the War Office.

The system map of the Southern Railway has a few extra blue lines superimposed over Kent, some of which extend to northern France. Their significance in such a context is wide open to conjecture.

Thts file will be available to download as soon as payment has been made. You go to your account and click on ‘Downloads’. New customers create an account as they place their order.