Wiki:Community Portal/MOT

What's this?

This project is to provide complete coverage of the OS Ministry of Transport Road Map series to SABRE Maps.

Who's working on this?

What's the process for putting up a new map?

Find some maps! They're not as widespread as, say, New Popular maps (which you can buy for a quid in Oxfam) but close monitoring on eBay has thrown up some good deals. Some professional map dealers regularly have copies.
Scan the maps. Most MOT maps will fit on an A1 scanner, but Ritchie333 has had surprisingly good results from taking four composite scans from an A3 scanner.
Stitch the scans back together to make a complete map. Even if you've found an A1 scanner, you might still have to do this anyway, because quite a number of maps floating around are library copies that have been cut along the fold, which you'll have to remove by hand. Although this sounds like a slow and laborious process, it is doable, and it has the advantage of not having the scan distorting along the fold (which is flipping irritating). Ritchie333 uses GIMP to do this.
Write the calibration file. This maps physical points on land to pixels on the scans. You need to do this to get all the maps to line up, and to display roads in the right place. See the technical notes at the bottom of the page. You can do this with Paint and Notepad, and it takes about 15 - 30 minutes.
Generate the tiles and upload them to the maps server
Party!

Sheet List: England and Wales

Maps online are in bold title for 1922-23 revision, other revisions are also in bold if online.

Maps known to exist at a legal deposit library but not online are in italic.

Maps owned by a member of SABRE and available for use on SABRE Maps are marked by §

}

Map Number	Map Name	Overlaps	Revisions	Notes
1	Jedburgh, Berwick upon Tweed and Alnwick	Scotland sheets 28, 32	1926-27, 1931-32	1926-27 - BL (dissected)
2	Carlisle	Scotland sheets 31, 32, 34	1928-29
3	Newcastle upon Tyne		1924-25 §	1924-25 - BL (dissected), Cambridge UL (unknown condition), Steven (excellent)
4	Isle of Man			Not issued as an MOT map
5	Lake District		1927-28	1927-28 BL
6	Middlesbrough, Richmond and Ripon		1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL 1936-37 - BL (dissected)
7	Whitby and Scarborough		1926-27	1926-27 BL
8	Lancaster, Southport and Preston	9	1924-25, 1930-31
9	Harrogate, Leeds and Bradford	8	1924-25	1924-25 - BL and Cambridge UL (unknown condition)
10	York and Kingston upon Hull		1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL
11	Carnarvon, Bangor and Colwyn Bay		1929-30	1929-30 - Cambridge UL (dissected)
12	Liverpool, Manchester and Chester		1924-25;, 1928-29, 1929-30, 1936-37	1924-25 - Steven
13	Sheffield		1924-25, 1929-30, 1936-37 §	1924-25 BL 1936-37 - Steven
14	Lincoln and Grimsby		1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL
15	Barmouth and Aberystwyth		1927-28	1927-28 BL
16	Wrexham, Shrewsbury and Hanley		1926-27	1926-27 BL
17	Derby, Nottingham and Leicester		1924-25 §, 1928-29, 1936-37	1924-25 - BL, Steven
18	Peterborough and Boston		1926-27	1926-27 - BL, Cambridge UL (unknown condition), Steven (excellent)
19	Norwich and Great Yarmouth		1924-25, 1927-28 §, 1936-37	1924-25 BL 1927-28 - BL and Cambridge UL (unknown condition) 1927-28 - Steven (dissected
20	Pembroke and Fishguard		1924-25	1924-25 - Ritchie333
21	Brecon and Lampeter		1927-28	1927-28 BL
22	Worcester and Ludlow		1924-25 §, 1929-30	1924-25 - BL and Steven 1929-30 - Cambridge UL (poor condition)
23	Birmingham, Leamington and Northampton		1926-27, 1936-37	1926-27 BL
24	Bedford and Cambridge		1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL and Ritchie333
25	Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich		1924-25, 1927-28, 1936-37	1924-25 - Cambridge UL (unknown condition) 1927-28 - Ritchie333
26	Swansea		1924-25, 1925-26	1924-25 - BL, Cambridge UL (unknown condition)
27	Gloucester, Monmouth and Newport		1926-27	1926-27 BL
28	Oxford and Swindon		1924-25 §, 1930-31	1924-25 BL and Steven (dissected)
29	North London, St Albans and Hertford	30, 34	1926-27	1926-27 BL
30	Colchester	29, 34	1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL
31	Bideford, Ilfracombe and Tiverton		1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL
32	Bristol and Cardiff	37	1926-27, 1936-37	1926-27 BL 1936-37 - Cambridge UL
33	Salisbury, Winchester and Reading	38	1927-28	1927-28 BL and M40
34	London	29, 30, 39	1925-26, 1927-28, 1936-37	1927-28 BL and Ritchie333
35	South West Cornwall and Scilly Isles		1927-28, 1930-31	1927-28 BL
36	Plymouth, Torquay and Exter		1927-28, 1930-31	1927-28 BL
37	Weymouth, Yeovil and Taunton	32	1927-28, 1930-31	1927-28 BL
38	Southampton, Portsmouth and Isle of Wight	33	1926-27, 1929-30	1926-27 BL
39	Brighton	34	1924-25, 1925-26 §, 1927-28	1924-25 BL 1925-26 - Steven 1927-28 - M40 - scan is badly foxed
40	Chatham, Margate and Hastings		1924-25, 1925-26, 1930-31	1924-25 - BL, Cambridge UL (unknown condition) 1925-26 BL

Total maps : 108
Total scanned : 56

Sheet List : Scotland

Map Number	Map Name	Overlaps	Revisions	Notes
1	Shetland Islands (north)
2	Shetland Islands (south)
3	Orkney Islands (north)		1930-31	Inset for Fair Isle
4	Orkney Islands (south)		1930-31
5	Lewis		1927-28, 1930-31	Inset for Flannan Islands 1927-28 BL
6	Cape Wrath
7	Wick and Thurso
8	Ullapool and Gairloch	11
9	Dornoch and Cromatry	13
10	North Uist		1927-28	1927-28 BL
11	Skye	8
12	Loch Carron
13	Inverness and Nairn	9	1927-28
14	Elgin, Keith and Huntly
15	Aberdeen and Banff
16	Barra		1927-28, 1930-31	1927-28 BL
17	Mallaig and Tobermory
18	Ben Nevis
19	Ballater and Pitlochry	24
20	Forfar and Stonehaven	24
21	Oban and Iona
22	Oban and Killin
23	Dundee, Perth and Stirling	24
24	Montrose, Dundee and Kirkcaldy	19, 20, 23
25	Islay	29	1927-28
26	Glasgow and Firth of Clyde	26
27	Lanark		1927-28, 1936-37
28	North Berwick and Kelso	England & Wales Sheet 1, 2	1927-28
29	Kintyre and Island of Arran	25, 26, 30
30	Ayr	29, 33
31	Moffat and Dumfries	34, England & Wales Sheet 2
32	Hawick, Jedburgh and Otterburn	England & Wales Sheet 1, 2
33	Wigtown and Stranraer	30	1927-28, 1930-31
34	Dumfries, Kirkcudbright and Cockermouth	31, England & Wales Sheet 2	1927-28, 1930-31

Total maps : 50
Total scanned : 29

Technical info

MOT maps predate the National Grid, and are derived off base maps that predate the Popular Edition which unified the whole of the UK under one projection system.

England and Wales

The English and Welsh maps use the Cassini (Delamere) projection. A handy page to convert between this, lat/lon and modern projections is here. This is defined in feet from an origin in Delamere Forest, Cheshire (where the A54 meets the A556) - approximately here.

Each map is broken up into 4x4 mile (ie: 21,120x21,120 feet) grid squares.

For English and Welsh maps, there are usually 13 1/2 west to east ("1" to "14" with 14 being half length, and 9 or 12 north to south ("A" to "J" or "M", "I" is not used). Most maps are "J" maps - the "M" maps include sheets 35 and 40. Sheet 40 is also narrower than most, with only 11 1/2 squares. The actual Delamere Forest origin is (according to my tape measure) 11/64 miles (907ft 6in) north and 9/128 miles (371ft 3in) west of the nearest grid square corner on sheet 12 (which is treated as the "false" origin for all other maps).

Most maps align exactly with each other, with only a few overlaps, the size of which is always a whole number of miles. The edges of the grid squares therefore generally line up with each other. The notable exceptions appear to be sheets 21, 31, 35 and 36, which have been aligned to fit as much land on the map without requiring an insert.

Scotland

The Scottish maps use the Bonne (Scotland) projection, defined in feet from latitude 57.5, longitude -4, which happens to be about halfway between Inverness and Nairn here. This is (from measuring map scans) about 1042 feet east and 438 feet north of the nearest grid square.

Scottish maps appear to be all 12 squares by 9 squares, though the orientation can vary between portrait (9 across, 12 down) and landscape (12 across, 9 down). A couple of maps (eg: sheet 24) overlap substantially with others.

General

All maps also has markers and bars along the edges specifying a specific arc of longitude or latitude, at minute intervals (with 60 minutes to a degree), with every 5 minutes marked explicitly. Latitude is always positive, longitude is positive east of the Greenwich Meridian, or negative west of it. This is useful for testing the corner of the map is where you think it should be.

Format of calibration file

The first row contains a single entry, which is the map number. Subsequent rows contain three comma separated fields :

A "grid reference". This consists of a letter (northing) followed by a number (easting) as seen on the map, and denotes the top left corner of that square. Because edges of the map frequently extend only to half squares, append "q" for a quarter length, "h" for half, or "t" for three quarters. The most common corners for the maps are A1, A14h, K1 and K14h.
The x pixel that contains the top left corner of the square.
The y pixel that contains the top left corner of the square.