Old maps of Essex

These maps were published in various forms from 1835 to 1895; they are all approx 320mm high by 290mm wide, and at a scale of approx 1:255,000 (c.4.0 miles to an inch).

The table below lists the five forms in which these maps occurred, with their approximate publication date ranges.

The maps showed the gradual spread of railways across Essex, using black lines engraved on the plates when they became aware of an Act authorising a route to be built, and then hand-drawn red lines over the black lines when a route was open.

Showing the railway routes

The first attempt used a faint pecked black line, followed by a hand drawn yellow line over the printed black line. They then hit their stride using two sets of parallel continuous black lines, that were mostly evenly spaced but sometimes a bit further apart or a bit too close together - and hence looking more like pairs of parallel lines rather than one set of four parallel lines. These were engraved on the plate as they became aware of an Act authorising the development of a new line, which was often several years before the line opened - if it opened at all.

They also used a triple set of parallel black lines, the central one being a little thicker than the outer two, almost as though the two sets of parallel lines were overlapping a mutual line; this became commoner later in the century. Showing lines on the maps was fine, but often these would not reflect the lines that were actually open for use - and hence they hand drew red lines along the tracks that were open. This they seemed to do when selling an atlas or individual map, so in principal you can estimate both the date of a sheet's underlying creation (from the black lines showing an Act being passed) and the date of a sheet's sale (from the red lines showing the open routes) - assuming you know both these dates for each of the routes in any given county!

The red lines were also sometimes drawn without an underlying black line (of any type), where they were using a very old sheet (pre-dating an Act) to make up an atlas for a new sale. In practice the Walkers were rather erratic in their stock control of the individual county sheets, only making up atlases when the need to have one for sale arose; the result of this was that some of their atlases sold in the 1850s had sheets created in the 1849, whereas some atlases dated 1861 and 1862 had sheets created in 1848 (with a lot of extra red lines).

The addition of the red lines over the printed black lines generally makes the red appear very dark, and very often makes it hard to determine whether the underlying printing is two pairs of parallel lines or one set of triple lines.