National Route Code Catalogue

[Senex]

This appears to have been issued for the first time in 1969, first in a provisional edition and then in a final version, and to have been revised annually at least to the middle of the 1980s. It broke the whole national network up into sections and assigned a numeric code to each section. The text was accompanied by a rather nice set of diagrammatic maps. Does anyone have any information as to which part of the BR organisation was responsible for the introduction of this list and what it was intended to be used for? And given that a significant amount of work must have been involved in its compilation and maintenance, why was it apparently dropped after a relatively short life (and not, it would seem, as part of the privatisation process)? The Engineer's Line Reference seems to do much the same job, but much less precisely.