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.
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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.