During the height of the railway mania tracks were being laid often with little or no purpose, throughout the land. While there were already lines running up the east and west coasts, linking London to Edinburgh and Glasgow, with cross country connections to Birmingham and other major industrial areas across industrial Midlands, Manchester and the burgeoning cotton towns of east Lancashire had no direct link to the south of England. As a result, a line was planned, running directly up the middle of the country, with off shoots east and west linking it to both the engineering giants of Birmingham and the ‘pot banks’ of Stoke on Trent. It would start at the ‘cathedral’ station of St Pancras in London and finish as befitted Manchester’s status at the business-like Central Station right in the heart of Cottonopolis. George Stephenson being the leading railway engineer of the time, was invited to build the line that became known, for obvious reasons, as the Midland Railway. Running the track directly up the country, he encountered no major problems in driving it more or less due north, through Leicester and Derby. It was when the line began to cut its way to the north of Derby, where Stephenson was so confident in the line’s potential that he made the then small market town the manufacturing centre of his operations. He also laid the foundations of lines running east and west, east to Nottingham and Lincoln and southwest to Birmingham and west to Liverpool by way of a hub of Crewe, eventually the manufacturing and traffic control of lines reaching north and west. It was while Stephenson was carving his Midland Line north of Derby that he hit the first of many problems. South of Derby all had been plain sailing so to say. Unlike...
