Railways

There are different types of railway to suite different needs. For the purposes of this project they have been grouped into three types:-

This covers factory and short distance lines owned by collieries, ironworks and other large scale industries where large quantities of bulky materials and goods need to be moved frequently either within a large site or between sites that may be a few miles apart.

The best known examples in Shropshire are the Lilleshall Company's internal railway and the Coalbrookdale Company's. Some of the larger collieries also had small railway networks within their areas. They were worked by locomotives and sometimes by horses.

A particular type of railway much used in the east Shropshire coalfield were narrow gauge tramways. Some of these used an edge rail with a flanged wheel and some had a plain wheel with flanged rail. Comon aspects were very narrow gauge, small vehicles and horse traction

This category covers those railways which were built to serve local needs and to feed into the main line network, although some had loftier visions. In Shropshire they were the Bishop's Castle Railway (BCR), the Snailbreach District Railway (SDR), the Cleobury Mortimer & Ditton Priors Light Railway (CMDPLR) and the Potteries, Shrewsbury and North Wales Railway (PSNWR). The last was later and better known as the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Railway (SMR).

A number of companies built long distance railways in Shropshire during the nineteenth century. Through a series of takeovers and mergers these became part of two much larger companies, the London and North Western Railway (which became part of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway in 1923) and the Great Western Railway.

At nationalisation on the 1st January 1948 the county was shared between the Western Region and the London, Midland & Scottish Region.