Information and education are at the heart of a museum. This website is intended to give details of the SRPS railway collection, and to explain its significance. We will continue to add new resources to explain the subject background, and to support visitors who wish to learn more.
While collection items are described and illustrated here, the best way to appreciate the real thing is close up. The website informs visitors about what we have, and what is on display. Until we can develop more buildings for displays, many items remain locked away. By prior arrangement, we can provide access to objects which are not on public display, and invite enquiries via the Feedback Form .
We hope that the website also encourages visitors to become members, and if possible volunteers, to support the collection and to keep it safe for the future. We give some details on the Volunteering page of the site.
We are proud of our collection, and invite visitors to share our pride and to use and enjoy the collection.
Much of the information here is based on the second edition of our printed Locomotive and Rolling Stock Catalogue, published in April 2007, with corrections and amplifications..
The authors of the website text are:-
The late John Burnie, who was a Chartered Mechanical Engineer and a railway enthusiast, who started work for the fledgling SRPS about 1964, when there was a big challenge to save heritage equipment from a railway system that was rapidly changing. The museum as it stands today is in large part due to his vision, enthusiasm and persistence over many years.
Kevin McCallum works for Network Rail in Scotland. As a professional railwayman, Kevin knows the subject in depth and has particular expertise in industrial railways.
John Forrest works for Doosan Babcock during the week, and for SRPS at the weekend. The quality of the presentation of the SRPS wagons is due to his expertise and efforts during many years.
W. Stuart Sellar is a retired railwayman, an expert tourist and a leading railway photographer.
Stuart Sellar (jun.) is a railwayman and engineer, working for Virgin Trains, and an expert on modern traction.
John Mayes' career has been in marketing and promotion. He edited the printed Catalogue on which the website text is based and saw it into press.
The list of photographers whose work appears here is much longer. We are grateful to them all.
Doug McEwan, on the Museum staff, has started a major review and update to the website (November 2011) and will welcome contributions and suggestions using Feedback.
We have tried to deliver an accessible website, available to those with older computers and slower modems. We have kept our navigation and formatting relatively simple.
All text is assigned a relative font size allowing you to control the displayed text size.
You can also adjust the text size by scrolling with the wheel of your mouse whilst holding down the control key.
All informational images contain an ALT tag.
The use of white background throughout the site, with plain black text, makes reading easier on the eyes, and allows the reader to take in more information.
The site is web standards compliant, and so should render properly in all browswers. Specifically, it has been designed and tested on a PC to be compatible with the following browsers:
A few pages of this website incorporate slideshows which use javascript. If javascript is not enabled in your browser, you will not see the sideshow. We have provided some advice on enabling javascript .
Links to pages outside this website are selected for their direct relevance to the website subjects. We hope that all links are useful, but we are not responsible for the content of linked sites.
Under our creative commons copyright licence, you are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes provided you attribute its source. This includes all unaccredited photographs and all those credited to photographers J.R. Hume, M. Mensing, J.L. Stevenson, W.S. Sellar, J. Burnie, and to "SRPS". Good quality images or prints may be available direct from the photographers for a reasonable charge. We will forward all requests - please supply a postal address and a phone number with your enquiry.
Other photographs, in cases where we have shown a photographer's name, are restricted to private use only, and may not be copied for public use of any kind without further permission.
We have credited photographers wherever possible. If you identify an image which you believe is missing a photographer credit, we will welcome information via the Feedback Form.
To describe objects, we have used the units of measure which were used to design or to use them. This means that we have generally used Imperial Units, such as feet and tons. We appreciate that this may confuse some readers, but note that there are good web resources which will convert units to SI or to most other systems of measure.