PROJECTS

THE STUDY OF BRITISH MILITARY RAILWAYS OVERSEAS

The use by the British of railways to transport and supply the army in the field is a much neglected subject. The earliest proposal for a British military railway was probably that which was contained in Wellington's memorandum of 1819 on the defence of Canada. Actual railways have been used extensively by the British Army overseas from the Crimea, where the railway was decisive in the siege of Sevastapol, until post-war Germany, see list below. However, there are only a few books on a few specific railways and no general history, other than what can be gleaned from the Royal Engineers Corps History, which is more concerned with organisational than technical matters.

With the demise of the Army Transport Museum at Beverley, there is no focus for research in this field. The only specialist group is the World War 2 Railway Study Group, which is small and its members are largely interested in the period from the late 1930’s to the 1950’s. The Royal Engineers Museum and Library at Chatham have some railway material.

Sue Lawrence was undertaking a massive project to document the details and history of African rolling stock while the necessary information is still available. For each class of wagon or coach she was preparing a set of diagrams showing the main dimensions and a history of build dates, fleet numbers, withdrawal dates, modifications and rebuilds. Mostly the diagrams are coloured and show all of the different liveries carried by members of the class. Rhodesia Railways stock is the first subject of research, but Sue had started on some other railways. She was always interested to hear from anybody who has drawings, diagram books etc., which will assist her research. However, we have lost contact with here and, as her health was not good, we must presume that she has died.

A (low resolution) sample of Sue Lawrence's drawings. This is one of a set of four showing later liveries and internal layout of this type of coach

It has been agreed with Sue Lawrence that BORHT will become the custodian of this work and will publish it on CD's. We are about to review what is available to publish a CD.

Britain used to export many things and these included buttons for uniforms. We have seen buttons made for SAR by Firmin of London from 1916 to 1925 and by Smith and Wright Ltd of Birmingham from 1926 to 1961 (the latter type has a monogram of the letters SARS) (dates as given by dealer and not yet verified) and also for the Burma Railway by Buttons Ltd of Birmingham. Is anybody researching the export of railway buttons?

THE COMBINED RAILWAY SOCIETIES' LIBRARY

This project was inspired by the Combined Engineering Societies' Library in New York and by the problem of adequate space for our library and archive collection. Why not have a combined railway societies library, probably in the southeast, somewhere were access is good? It is being developed by Professor Paddy Farrell within the context of a general review of a future home for BORHT and its activities, as we have outgrown the expensive accomodation which we occupy in Greenwich.

The general idea is that there is a potential saving of scale if a number of societies were to join together to acquire a library building. Collections would be kept separate (unlike New York), but share overheads such as staff and copying equipment. We are aware that there are a number of railway societies in the London area without adequate facilities for their libraries and archive storage. Such an arrangement would benefit researchers as they would have the resources of several collections available at one location. The details remain to be worked out.