Joe Brown

I am a railway professional and near-lifelong London resident who since childhood had a keen interest in cartography as well as railways. I joined London Underground as a Northern Line Guard in 1997 shortly after leaving school, and progressed to a ‘Guard-Motorman’ on that line in 1998 before transferring to be a District Line Train Operator at Parson’s Green the following year. In 2001 I was promoted to Duty Manager Trains at Earl’s Court, where I remained for six years before being promoted to Train Operations Manager at Elephant & Castle (Bakerloo Line) in 2007. Since then, I have gained experience managing station operations on the Marylebone Group of six Bakerloo Line stations, before returning to Trains management in 2011 as Train Operations Manager at Wembley Park Depot on the Jubilee Line. At the beginning of the Covid-19 panedmic I moved to the role of Executive Officer for Customer Operations, before moving to my current role of Strategic Delivery & Change Manager in 2021.

It was around 2003 that the seed was sown in my mind; I tried to find an historical atlas of London’s railways and failed. I couldn’t believe that nobody had produced one, and so after asking around with regard to appropriate software, I started having a crack myself. It was nothing more than a hobby, but after a year or so of work I sent a sample off to Ian Allan and the rest is history. I have produced the six editions of the London Railway Atlas, two editions of the Birmingham and West Midlands Railway Atlas, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Atlas, and now the 16th edition of the late Stuart Baker's Rail Atlas of Great Britain and Ireland around a busy work schedule on a home computer, self-taught on fairly basic software without any formal design training.

Long-term I hope to continue updating all four titles every few years, with a view to tackling other cities in this same format when time permits. Transforming from a member of Tube staff clumsily ‘having a go’ at drawing maps at home to a ‘go-to’ railway cartographer and authority on railway history in a few years is definitely not something I’d have ever predicted!

Follow me on X / Bluesky for the latest updates and daily facts about railway history: @joebrownlondon