Nearly all the pre-grouping companies have now been covered in detailed histories. The GSW and the LC&D were among the last, but they now have good books about them. Only the Maryport and Carlisle seems to lack a full history. Why is this? There are brochures, one by Jack Simmons and the other by Herbert and Mary Jackson, but the latter is not really a history of the company. The Cumbrian Railways Association has reissued McGowan Gradon's old books on the west Cumberland lines, but it doesn't seem, as far as I can see, to have anything available on the M&C.
The company may not have been big, but it was a solidly profitable undertaking, and was able to finance all its enhancements out of revenue, without raising new capital. My late best friend told me that his grandma had owned M&C shares, and deplored the grouping because her new LMS shares didn't pay anything like as good a dividend. The M&C generated on-line freight traffic until relatively recently (opencast coal), over a century and a half since its creation.
Maybe this is an illustration of Hilton's Law, stated by the American railroad historian George Hilton, that companies attract attention in inverse proportion to their real economic significance, so that ramshackle picturesque byways get written about while solid workaday performers are ignored. In the UK context, that would explain why a basket case like the Stratford and Midland Junction has a good book, while the M&C doesn't.
The company may not have been big, but it was a solidly profitable undertaking, and was able to finance all its enhancements out of revenue, without raising new capital. My late best friend told me that his grandma had owned M&C shares, and deplored the grouping because her new LMS shares didn't pay anything like as good a dividend. The M&C generated on-line freight traffic until relatively recently (opencast coal), over a century and a half since its creation.
Maybe this is an illustration of Hilton's Law, stated by the American railroad historian George Hilton, that companies attract attention in inverse proportion to their real economic significance, so that ramshackle picturesque byways get written about while solid workaday performers are ignored. In the UK context, that would explain why a basket case like the Stratford and Midland Junction has a good book, while the M&C doesn't.