Joseph Mitchell

Joseph Mitchell (1803–1883) was a Scottish civil engineer best known as the constructor of much of the Highland Railway system through the 1850s and 1860s, including the original Inverness & Nairn line of 1855 and the difficult crossings of the Grampians and the Dava Moor. He was the son of John Mitchell, who had been Telford's Inspector for the construction of the Caledonian Canal, and rose to inherit his father's office at the age of 21.

Born at Forres on 3 November 1803, Mitchell was apprenticed in his father's office. He laid out and built the Inverness & Nairn (the Highland's earliest predecessor) and the Inverness & Aberdeen Junction Railway, then engineered the line through to Wick and Thurso. He retired in 1867 and devoted his later years to writing the three-volume Reminiscences of My Life in the Highlands, an important source for nineteenth-century Highland engineering. He died at Inverness on 26 November 1883.