Sunday 1 August 2010

The Welcome, and the Mission Statement

Welcome

Welcome to my British railway document site that is an extension of the 'Turnip Rail' Blog. Once a day (hopefully, time permitting) I will post extracts from a document in my collection that all come the history of Britain's Railways.

My Mission

So what is the aim of this new site? The goal is to promote the idea that private ownership of historical railway documents is not a good thing if they are kept hidden away. Why? The data that is contained within the documents could potentially help re-write the history of Britain's Railways. While we as a historical community are aware of when events happened, such as when lines were built, when yards were constructed or when accidents happened, there are so many questions that could be answered by using privately held documents. Thus, this site is to not only show what documents I have in my collection, but also to provide some brief analysis alongside to highlight each one's importance to British railway history. I suppose the overriding goal is to show how your document could aid the study of British railway history and why it should be more widely available.

Action

With these goals in mind, anybody can provide me with images of their documents so that more data can be spread throughout the internet. Of course, there is one problem, in that I cannot show everything that is held within larger documents as that would take too much time. So, as an example, beside me is a handbook listing all of Britain's stations in 1956 and showing their various facilities. It is 494 pages long, however, the most I will post is 3 or 4 images from it. Therefore, if anyone wishes to have a fuller copy of the larger documents I will post, I may have to look into the time it would take to copy them. Overall, just sit back and enjoy the collection.

David

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