A trainspotter's paradise

Steve Pratt explores an Aladdin’s cave of treasures at the National Railway Museum in York.

BOXES. Hundreds and hundreds of acid-free boxes standing on shelves with a heat-resistant coating in a climate-controlled building. Inside the boxes is the history of Britain’s railways.

Part of the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, this is a veritable Aladdin’s cave for train and track enthusiasts, whether they want to peruse the oldest railway timetable, look at original posters, view publicity material for Virgin Trains or even see the design plans for carriage interiors.

This is where the team constructing Tornado, the first full-size locomotive built in this country for nearly 50 years, came to study the A1 locomotive engineering drawings to ensure the train was as authentic as possible.

Since opening in January last year, the £4m archive and research centre known as Search Engine has made railway history more accessible to the public. The collection has been gathered together from other railway museum archives as well as donations from the public and railway industry.

Lovers of facts and figures should know that the facility houses 1.5 million photographs, one million engineering drawings, more than 20,000 library books and 800 magazine, journal and newsletter titles. There are 9,000 railway posters, 350,000 railway tickets, 2,000 works of art, 2,500 items of heraldry, more than 2,000 moving image, oral history and sound recordings and more than three kilometres of letters, reports and railway papers.

The aim of the project – funded by, among others, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Higher Education Funding Council for England – has been to sort the material and make it more available to the public. As you can tell by the wealth of material, this is a long and painstaking job.

“There were old, small storerooms, nowhere near up to the right climatic standards or storage conditions, and the old reading room was tiny,” explains archivist Tim Procter as we tour the facility.

“We knew there was a massive demand out there, but there was no way we could serve people.

It wasn’t friendly or welcoming.”

After nine years of planning, Search Engine opened at the NRM on January 9, last year.

Overlooking the main floor of the museum, it offers a raised view of the displays that did not exist before.

An exhibition area leads to a reading space, with railway books and magazines for all ages from Thomas the Tank Engine for youngsters to more technical manuals for real trainspotters.

It is an archive, library and objects collection.

A duty curator is on hand to answer questions.

There is space to sit and take notes, and visitors can ask to view specific objects in the collection.

The questions posed are many and varied.

Someone wanted to know if there were women’s hairdressers on station forecourts in the old days.

Another man inquired if the archive had material on Peckett, a Bristol firm that made industrial steam locos for which he had been an apprentice. Procter was able to produce thousands of drawings of the locos and a search revealed a drawing bearing the man’s initials.

Behind the scenes, work continues on cataloguing previously-unsorted material now that the museum’s library and archive collections have been brought together. Before there was a real danger of parts of the story of our railway heritage being lost or forgotten.

In the first year of operation, the Search Engine teams moved 147 tons – more than the weight of the Flying Scotsman – of archive, library and photo collections into the storerooms.

Like painting the Forth Bridge, it is a neverending task, as more collections and items are acquired every month. Such as the 200,000 original images of civil engineering and infrastructure work taken by the official photographic unit for British Rail and its predecessor, the London and North Eastern Railway.

The first year of Search Engine has been hailed a success with nearly 30,000 visitors.

Moving image plays a part too, after the NRM bought all 47 programmes, comprising more than 100 short films in both colour and black and white, from the BBC series Railway Roundabout.

This chronicles the golden age of steam during the late Fifties and early Sixties.

Other items in the collection include a 1745 manuscript for a handbook for colliery officials on how to pull a wagon.

Ask Procter to produce an old timetable and, from a box, he carefully holds up one of the first, dating from 1839.

If you want a train ticket, the collection has plenty – 350,000 tickets covering the length and breadth of the railway system. Warrants for World War One soldiers have been kept too.

Since the opening of Search Engine, exhibitions in the gallery area have highlighted aspects of the rail world.

They have included the Backhouse letter, containing a vivid description of the birth of passenger rail transport by John Backhouse, a 14-year-old Quaker from County Durham.

The letter describes the opening of the first permanent steam locomotive-operated railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, in 1825.

It also includes the very first child’s drawing of a train. This is believed to be the very first example of “trainspotting”.