Blog at the Ballast

The August batch of photos have been scanned and are up on our flickr pages.  We're up to the 'Rs' which is a small batch but includes one of my favourites of the puffer ROMAN unloading potatoes at Kilchattan Bay.  I've blogged about it before so can't use it as a Friday Photo for this week and will have to pick something else for tomorrow.

Image from here

The National Archives announced today that the records of railway workers are now available online via Ancestry.  At the Ballast Trust the railway records we are working on tend to be the production drawings and often all you get of the person who drew them is a set of initials in the title box.

The information now online has come from the TNA's Railway Employment Records, 1833-1963.  This is a collection of over 2 millions employement records from a number of historic railway companies in England, Scotland, and Wales.

All of the railways included in this database were once private companies that later came under authority of the British Transport Commission with the 1947 Transport Act. The collection features selected records from the following companies:
RAIL226: Great Central Railway Company
RAIL264: Great Western Railway Company
RAIL397: London and North Eastern Railway Company
RAIL410: London and North Western Railway Company
RAIL411: London and South Western Railway Company
RAIL414: London, Brighton and South Coast Railway
RAIL415: London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company (formerly the East Kent Railway)
RAIL426: London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company
RAIL463: Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company
RAIL491: Midland Railway Company
RAIL1156: Special Collections: Retired Railway Officers' Society

Approximately 50% of the books cover the Great Western Railway, while the books covering the London and North Western Railway are more dense with records. Most records are prior to 1949, though some date later.

The most common record type in the database is a staff register. Others include station transfers, pension and accident records (which can include death date), apprentice records (which can include father's name), caution books, and memos.

Read more about it here on the TNA site or start searching here with Ancestry.

Today we end July's Friday photo with an image of the Queen Mary leaving the Clyde in 1936.  She was built by John Brown & Co.


We have lots of others showing the ship close up here but this one of the two boys watching it go past is my favourite.

Full specification details are available from Clydebuilt.

As well as writing an Annual Report for the Trustees and clients and friends of the Ballast Trust to receive.  I also put together a formal update for clients on what collections we have of theirs and what the status is of each of the collections.

Some of the collections we work on are pretty big and the work often takes years - particularly when we are relying on volunteers to help us process it.  Last week I wrote up the annual updates for 2010/11 for our current client repositories - National Records of Scotland, Glasgow City Archives, Glasgow University Archive Services, Edinburgh City Archives, McLean Museum, Cody Images and Caledonian Railway Association.  Some of the updates were a little disheartening as it seemed like not a lot had changed but I had to remind myself that collections with 1000s of items in them take a long time to complete.

So while, the majority of the collections we're working on are all still in progress there are a few here at the Ballast that are finished and ready to go back to their repositories.  I'm going to post about these later this week to highlight their value as collections.