At the time of railway privatisation in the mid 1990s, it was realised that there could be a risk that some of the railway artefacts and records that existed in the nationalised railway sector could be unwittingly disposed of, as private entities set up and sought to rationalise their new companies. In order to avoid this, the Railway Heritage Committee (RHC) was set up to preserve items identified as being of particular interest in preserving the railway story. The Science Museum Group took over the role of designating railway assets from the RHC in 2013. RHDAB ensures a future for railway he ..read more

Have you ever thought about donating something to a museum? At the National Railway Museum our Collections and Research team constantly receive offers to donate items for collection. So why are nearly all of them declined? Read on to find out… The National Railway Museum collections are huge. What you can see on display at York or at Locomotion is just the tip of the iceberg. Like most museums, a large proportion of the collections remain out of sight. That is particularly true of material like archival documents, drawings and posters, but most of them are available to view by arranging a visi ..read more

On 27 September 1825 a small steam locomotive, now known as Locomotion No 1, left Shildon on a momentous journey.  Pulling a mix of coal wagons, a carriage, and wagons full of passengers, this was the first steam-hauled passenger train on a public railway. Its progress was watched by huge crowds who sensed that the world had just changed. Now, as we approach the bicentenary, we are planning how we celebrate that historic day and the 200 years of railway history that have followed. At the heart of our commemorations is Vision 2025, the hugely ambitious transformation of our museums in York ..read more

Preface Quite recently we received a consignment of material originally located at the former Science Museum Group’s London store, Blythe House. The collection material was transferred to the National Railway Museum for safe keeping. During the cataloguing review of the archive, I discovered a drawing on tracing paper of Agenoria, one of the early locomotives, currently located in the National Railway Museum’s Great Hall. Agenoria (Photo: Science Photo Library)Agenoria with a contemporary style tender. (Photo source: Stourbridge Library) During the brief viewing, while implementing the indexin ..read more

Beyer, Peacock & Co. of Manchester was one of Britain’s greatest firms of locomotive builders. Their products can be found across Europe, Scandinavia, Egypt and one solitary example in the United States. Perhaps the most famous locomotives built by the Gorton firm were the Beyer-Garratts, examples of which can be found throughout Africa, India and Australasia. The global success of the firm for over 100 years was down to the excellence of its design in no small part thanks to a queer German immigrant, Charles Beyer. A portrait of Charles Beyer (Credit: Brookfield Church, Gorton) Charles Be ..read more

Wonderlab: The Bramall Gallery will be a space for everyone. At the forefront of our creative development process is the focus to ensure our new interactive gallery is accessible and inclusive. We want everyone to feel they belong in the gallery, where they can think like engineers as they explore a variety of interactive exhibits. To achieve a space that we can be proud to say is open for all, we have taken many considerations throughout the gallery’s development, in collaboration with Accessibility and Inclusive Design Consultant Emily Yates, from Mima Group. The Social Model of Disability f ..read more

Reproduction of a watercolour entitled “Opening of Stockton and Darlington Railway from a sketch by the artist” (1875) (Object no.1943-252) The Leonard Raisbeck Archive offers insight into his association with the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR), from promoting the railway at its inception to becoming one of the company’s solicitors and representing the interests of Stockton. This blog post places some of the material in the Raisbeck archive into context, presents some of the wider legal aspects that came with establishing a railway company, and provides a behind-the-scenes look ..read more

The author cataloguing items from the Raisbeck collection in late 2021 Image no.: 525885 Archive catalogues are often the first way researchers access a collection, and it is the job of an archivist to generate these catalogues. But how catalogues are created can be a bit of a mystery. In this post I’ll take you through the work undertaken between May 2021 and May 2022 by seven colleagues from the NRM’s Collections and Research team to catalogue the Leonard Raisbeck Archive. The archival hierarchy depicted through the medium of archive boxes, so along as the hierarchy follows the top-down str ..read more

2022-2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of Asian communities from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. Though an event that led to such incredible violence, forced displacement, and uncertainty, this anniversary also reminds us of how much this community has provided to modern British society. From building the Kenya-Uganda railway (popularly known as the Lunatic Line) in the late 19th century to departing on train journeys across East Africa and later Britain to start their new lives in 1972-3, this community has a long and complex relationship with the British railway industry (find out ..read more

From March 2022 to July 2022, Faris Al Ali and I were volunteer researchers on an exciting project to find out more information about a WHSmith bookstall which was located inside London’s Waterloo station from 1922 until 1978 when it was dismantled. In his separate blog post, Faris outlines how he discovered the bookstall we were investigating was known as ‘Waterloo Loop’. My aim in this post is to give you some idea about the people who worked there. Like the hundreds of other WHSmith railway station bookstalls once dotted throughout the country, the one at ‘the Loop’ was staffed by a booksta ..read more