Tamworth to Derby : featuring the Burton Brewery lines
by V. Mitchell and K. Smith
Publisher: Middleton Press
Publishdr: 2015
ISBN 9781908174765
Reviewed for Volume 3 Issue 1 Winter 2025
The Review
This is one of a series of about 450 books on railway lines. I haven’t seen the others but this one is not a history book. It is a photo book of some 120 photos and 17 maps. The history of the line is condensed to 10 sentences on page…. Well the pages are not numbered. However it is the same page that covers the geographical setting in even less space and taking up as much space, is a diagram of the height profile of the line. Though sadly there is no caption to explain the numbers on the diagram, which at first I thought were height above sea level but clearly not, possibly incline rates?
Following this are six passenger timetable charts from 1887, 1897, 1917, 1937, 1941 and 1952 along with a table of the frequency of trains for 1845, 1869, 1899, 1929, 1959, 1998 there are no accompanying notes. Whilst interesting, this patchwork of numbers, is not going to help as you will have to fill in the blanks between the two overlapping sets of data.
However there are 19 very useful maps of stations and junctions, most unaccredited. Also the dates are disjoint so it is a moving picture. Whilst they are helpful you will have to find the sources yourself and probably other maps of the period you are interested in.
This leaves the 120 photos. All of which have good captions explaining the photo some with dates. The photos are in geographical order from Tamworth to Derby. The problem here is the photos are random, one of the 1960s next to one of the late 1800s. I haven’t found any sets were there was an old and new shot of the same location. Reading the history of the publisher/authors who are one and the same they refer to the books as “albums” and the 120 photos seems to be their yardstick.
So, it is what it is: a railway photo book. Unless you are a serious railway enthusiast I would suggest you get this book from the library rather than buying it. It is useful as a resource for your own research, though without citations and references, but is nowhere near complete on its own.
