Transport Collection
Brunel University Library owns one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of ephemera, books, manuscript material, journals, maps and photographs on railway history in the country. This collection forms one of the Special Collections housed in the University Library in the Bannerman Centre.
The major part of the collection is the 8,000 books, journals, maps, documents and notes bequeathed to Brunel Universiy Library by the railway historian, Charles Clinker, who died in 1983. Clinker had worked on the management staff of the Great Western Railway until 1945. After the war, convinced that valuable evidence about railway history was being destroyed, he devoted himself to collecting this material and writing about it, producing numerous books and articles, of which the best known is probably Clinker's register of closed passenger stations and goods depots. The collection includes his detailed working notes for the various editions of this publication. He was interested in literature as evidence for the history of railways. Reflecting his own professional background and personal interests, his collection is more concerned with the management and running of railways than with railway and locomotive engineering.
The second major bequest came from the estate of David Garnett, who died in 1984. He collected books about railway history (c. 2,000 titles) but his chief interest was in railway maps and, in particular, the maps associated with the Railway Clearing House. He collected as many of the maps and of the more detailed junction diagrams as he could find and attempted to track down different editions.
Railway Clearing House maps were vital in settling accounts between the various railway companies that operated in Britain before the First World War, over 120 companies in all. The Railway Clearing House made it possible for customers to send goods anywhere within the system or for passengers to travel across the country using the different company lines. The maps allowed careful calculation of how much traffic had been carried over what distance and showed which company owned which part of the track.
The Transport Collection also holds a large number of Ordnance Survey and Bartholomew's maps of the UK in various editions, including some interesting war time maps and lots of motorists' and cyclists' maps of the pre-Second World War countryside with not a motorway to be seen!
The collection includes several separate collections of railway photographs of particular interest to the social as well as the railway historian. The Mowat collection of about 2,500 photographs includes railway scenes taken between 1924 and 1969 with a few earlier examples. Professor Mowat concentrated on recording smaller stations and branch lines and visited almost every part of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on his photographic tours.
Also documenting the unusual and little studied is the collection of photographs taken by Chris Wookey, a student at Brunel from 1975 to 1979. His interest was in railway stations and signal boxes and the large collection covers all parts of the country.
The photographic collection includes a superb set of locomotive photographs taken between 1928 and the 1970s, recording steam locomotives in particular.
Our most recent donation has been a large collection of railway tickets, given by Stephen Bragg, former Vice Chancellor of Brunel University. This is a valuable and comprehensive collection of tickets, the earliest dated 1836 from the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway when train tickets resembled stagecoach tickets and were cut from a printed sheet, the booking clerk filling in the details of each journey as they were issued. The bulk of the collection is of card tickets, known as Edmondsons after their inventor, and represent some skill on the part of the collector - tickets were rigorously collected at the end of each journey and keeping your ticket required subterfuge including getting off at an earlier station and buying a ticket for one stop!
The Transport Collection is part of Special Collections, within the University Library and can be visited by appointment. Further details about the collection may be found here.
