Doncaster Grammar School Railway Collection

Yorkshire Post

Chris Barron, one of the Trustee's of the Doncaster Grammar School Railway Collection, chats about their new home and how the public will soon be able to view it.

Transcript

00:00 My name is Chris Barron and I'm a trustee of the Doncaster Grammar School Railway Collection

00:05 and here we are in our Rail Heritage Store, which is where the vast majority of our collection is.

00:13 We think we've got about 10,000 items in the collection and about 9,500 of them are in this store.

00:21 This store is in the City of Doncaster Archives building

00:25 and we brought it all here from the old Grammar School clock tower about four years ago.

00:32 We've done a lot of work to actually get the store organised in such a way that we can now start to open it up to visitors.

00:44 I'm stood in front of what we call the Cemetery Wall, hopefully for obvious reasons.

00:51 This is a recreation of a very similar wall that we had in the Grammar School water tower,

00:58 but we couldn't recreate it exactly because quite a number of the nameplates are actually on display

01:05 in our Rail Heritage Centre at the Danum Gallery.

01:09 But we wanted to try and recreate something of it and this is a collection of nameplates from locomotives

01:17 as well as makers plates from different railway companies.

01:23 We're now in the main part of our storeroom, which is where the bulk of the collection actually is

01:29 and all of it is now well organised on racking and shelving.

01:36 Here typically we've got all sorts of railway equipment, we've got signalling block instruments,

01:43 we've got lamps and we've got all sorts of miscellaneous items,

01:51 many of which have been organised into stacks as a way of storing the most things that we can find.

02:03 This is a lot of hard work that's been done over the last couple of years

02:09 in order to create organisation out of what was a pretty chaotic situation when we first brought the collection here.

02:16 This is just a miscellany of things from the collection to demonstrate how broad the collection is

02:24 and we just put these things out on display more for their curiosity value than anything else.

02:31 So we've got things ranging even from cutlery from restaurant cars on trains and railway hotels.

02:39 Here's another steam locomotive whistle.

02:44 This is a gauge that would have been in a signal box to indicate to the signalman

02:50 what level of water was in the water tank, which is where locomotives would occasionally have to take water.

03:00 So there was no point in actually having the tank empty when the time came,

03:05 so it was important to know how much water was available.

03:11 Here we have a typical block instrument from a signal box

03:16 and this one actually happens to be from Nottingley, which is not too far from Doncaster.

03:23 This is the way that signal boxes communicated with one another in the pre-electronic era

03:31 and this instrument was linked to a very similar instrument in the next signal box down the line

03:38 and it was the way in which two signalers would know whether the line was clear to accept a train into the block section

03:49 or whether the line was blocked already by another train.

03:54 And so this was the basis on which railway signalling was conducted right up until very recent times

04:04 with the advent of power signalling and then more laterally with electronic signalling.

04:11 This here was the mainstay of every station booking office on the railway.

04:18 It's called an Edmondson date stamper and these dates in here were put into the machine

04:27 and the ticket, which was all of the card type patented by Edmondson,

04:34 the ticket was actually put into there and it would date stamp the ticket

04:39 and until the ticket had been date stamped, the ticket was not valid.

04:43 This is one of the finds of the collection that we've discovered as we've gone through our cataloguing of it

04:50 and this is a lithograph of Edmond Dennison, who was a prominent figure.

04:57 He was MP for the West Riding of Yorkshire and he was instrumental in bringing the railway to Doncaster.

05:04 He was also the chairman of the Great Northern Railway

05:08 and he had to battle to get his bill through Parliament that enabled the railway from King's Cross to Doncaster to be built.

05:17 And he signed this lithograph on the date June 1846.

05:25 That's when the bill passed through Parliament.

05:29 At long last, it took several years to get the bill through Parliament,

05:33 but at long last permission was given for the railway to be built.

05:37 Here we have a pallet full of locomotive whistles.

05:42 Most of them are steam locomotive whistles.

05:45 The steam was forced through this instrument and the compression of the steam actually made the sound of the locomotive's whistle.

05:54 But there at the back are also two horns from diesel locomotives.

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