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Getting Started

About the Archive

Welcome to the Railways Archive: a free online archive of documents charting the development of Britain's railways. If you are looking for key historical documents related to Britain's railways, you have come to the right place. Our archive contains acts of parliament, accident reports, publicity material, financial & economic reports, strategy documents, technical documents, white papers and more.

Wide Search

The site contains two main archives - documents and accidents. The two archives are linked, so that you can search for an accident and then see related documents, or the other way around. Each archive listing has a set of filters to allow you to look at a year, group of years, railway company, author and more.

The best way to get started, if you are looking for a particular item, is to use the "wide search" box at the top of this page. Type in the terms you are looking for, and we will show you the accidents and documents which we think are most relevant. If you are looking for an accident, try typing in the location and year and we will search for it.

You can also browse the entire archive by date, category, event, development, author, or publisher.

The Document Archive

The document archive is a database of documents, from the earliest days of the railways right up to the present day. If we have a copy of the document, you can download a PDF to read and print at your leisure.

From the first Act of Parliament to regulate railways, through to the Modernisation Plan, Beeching Reports, the collapse of Railtrack and right up to the Crossrail Act 2008, the archive is invaluable to anyone researching UK railway history and requiring access to primary source material.

Our latest documents listing shows you which items have recently been added. Or you can view our latest additions using our RSS feed for documents.

The Accident Archive

As well as the list view, the accident archive has a map view and a chart view. If you have Google Earth installed on your machine you can also download our kml file to view with the software.

Our accident archive includes accidents which have been the subject of a formal accident report, and also accidents which were not.

You can also keep tabs on accident news using our RSS feed for accidents.

The News Archive

Every 15 minutes we check the BBC News site for stories which might be of interest. These stories are presented using our RSS feed for news stories. You can also view all the news stories we have gathered at our News Story Archive.

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