Swindon's Other Railway

Luggage labels courtesy of Mike Morant

Mike has very kindly provided a collection of luggage labels with a relevance to the M&SWJR for us to view. I am extremely grateful to Mike for the preparation he has given to this section of the website.

Mike has grouped the collection alphabetically by destination within the originating railway’s name.

The images have been sized proportionately in order to show the relative formats of the different companies’ labels. As you can see, the MSWJR’s labels are considerably larger than the rest and there’s an axiom within the hobby that “the smaller the railway then the larger are its luggage labels”. Note, also, that some of the MSWJR labels are actually much smaller than the bulk of them but there's no obvious reason why this format for so few examples was ever adopted. The selection shown below constitutes about half of the known survivors from the MSWJR. Note that the type without an underlined heading is very prone to desiccation and so they are prone to edge damage. It's ironic that the example to Edinburgh is the most damaged one on display as that type has generally survived well for the last 100 years and more.

Mike’s own label collecting bug focuses on the south of England and the whole of Scotland. The former is selective in its scope and excludes the GWR. His LSWR collection, admired by aficionados of late, is largely directed towards the highly prized early coloured labels issued up until about 1888 and some are included in the assortment shown below. The LSWR colour coded its labels - presumably for illiteracy reasons - until the 1880’s and all such labels for MSWJR destinations were printed on yellow paper. Note, also, the misspelling on the Callingbourne (sic) example which was even repeated on another version with (Via Andover Junction) below it. Mike has an excellent collection of archive transport images, a selection of which he has placed on his website which can be viewed by clicking here.

London, Brighton and South Coast Railway