The British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer was first published by Ian Allan Publishing in 1958 but has not been revised since the fifth edition in 1967. For this new edition the cartography has been completely redrawn in the larger page size of our recent atlases to make the mapping much clearer and easy to read. It has also been thoroughly corrected and for the first time will include lines not built at the time of the 1923 Grouping to show the entire historical railway network. The atlas will also have a gazetteer listing abbreviations of all the railway companies and an index listing all tunnels, water troughs, principal summits, stations, good and locomotive sheds, depots etc and junctions named on the maps.
The British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazetteer is a complete record of the approximately 150 of different companies that ran Britain’s passenger railways, including narrow gauge, before the Grouping into the Big Four companies in 1923. The ownership of each line is differentiated by colour coding on the maps, with enlarged sections of the most complicated centres, making this an essential work of reference for all those interested in the history of Britain’s railways, both the thousands of miles of railway lines that have now disappeared and the origins of today’s network that survives.
