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The Midland Railway (MR) was a Railway company in the United Kingdom , which existed from 1844 to 1922 . It was formed in 1844 by the merger of the Midland Counties Railway , the North Midland Railway , and the Birmingham And Derby Junction Railway . The Midland owned a large network of railway lines centred on the East Midlands , and its head office was in Derby . The MR's main line, known unsurprisingly as the Midland Main Line , connected the East Midlands to London St Pancras Station and to Sheffield Midland Station . The company also owned the main lines connecting the East Midlands to Birmingham and Bristol , and to Manchester . In the 1870s a dispute with the London And North Western Railway over access rights to the LNWR line to Scotland caused the MR to construct the Settle And Carlisle (S&C) line, the highest main line in England, in order to secure the company's access to Scotland; ironically the dispute with the LNWR was settled before the S&C was built, but Parliament refused to allow the MR to withdraw from the project. It also owned a number of less important lines, and in partnership with the Great Northern Railway it owned the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway to provide connections from the Midlands to East Anglia; the M&GN was the UK's biggest joint railway system. The Midland pioneered the use Gas Lighting of Train s in Britain, put third-class carriages on all its trains in 1872 , and abolished second class in 1875 , giving third class passengers the level of comfort formerly afforded to second class passengers (elsewhere some third class passengers travelled in open wagons) and introduced the first British Pullman supplementary-fare cars. The non-contiguous numbering of classes, with 1st and 3rd class only, continued until 1956 , when third class was renamed second. The company was Grouped into the London, Midland And Scottish Railway (LMS) on January 1 , 1923 and was the most influential of the pre-grouping companies that formed the LMS. See also Locomotives Of The Midland Railway . EXTERNAL LINKS |
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