“Industrial Railway Record” Back Issues

Many of the earlier issues of "Industrial Railway Record" magazine are now out of print. The IRS Committee felt that these issues presented an important archive of information relating to the history of industrial railways, which we felt should be made more readily available to those interested in the subject. As there seems little chance that these old issues of the "Record" would ever be reprinted, it was decided to utilise modern technology to make them more accessible to researchers, via the Internet.

We have therefore begun the process of posting the text and pictures of out of print issues of the "Record" on the IRS website. Each article (and the letters page) will be shown as a series of single web pages, without the page numbers and page breaks that appeared on the paper originals, nor will any real attempt be made to show the actual formatting and type fonts used in the original magazines. Our feeling is that it is the actual information that matters, not the exact presentation, and this simplified approach will speed up the process of making this material available.

It should be noted that only issues of the "Record" that are out of print will be placed on this website, as the Society still wishes to sell our remaining stock of back issues! Issues still in print can be purchased through our sales page. A full index of volumes 1 - 16 of the 'Record' is also available in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format from the Downloads page.

There is a full list of all issues of the "Record", including those still in print, with links to those articles that appear on this site. This list can be found on the Index of Back Issues page.

Index of Back Issues

Also, to make it easier to find your way through the various issues and articles, each article has a series of links at the bottom of the page, that will lead you through to the archive. The layout of these links is explained below:-

Key to the links at the end of each article

Returns you to the master index of back issues.

Takes you to the previous article in this issue. If this link appears in the first article in an issue, then it takes you to the first page in the previous issue.

Takes you to the next article in this issue, or the first article in the next issue.
 

If this article is part of a series, spread over a number of issues, then these links will take you to the previous or subsequent articles in this series.

A notable feature of the "Record" is that reader's letters often contain useful supplementary information on matters covered in the articles. This "letterbox" link takes you to any letters relating to the original article.

If there are further letters relating to the article, then this "blue arrow" link will take you on to these subsequent letters, and so on.

  A proposed link to an issue or article that has not yet been up-loaded to the website.

As this is intended as a true archive of the "Record", the text will be as it appeared in the original magazine "warts and all". The only corrections incorporated into the text will be common spelling mistakes, plus those corrections that have been published in the "Corrigenda" page of the official indexes to each volume of the magazine; these corrections are marked in red in the text. Any errors in spelling of place names, companies and individuals, as well as grammatical errors, will be left as they were in the original text. However it should be noted that the text shown in these archives was produced by retyping or OCR scanning of the original magazine pages, and this process is likely to have introduced mistakes into the text. If any viewer of this archive spots any such mistakes, we would be glad to know of them. The webmaster would also glad to hear via email of any comments you may have on this project.

Important - Copyright

Copyright for all issues of the "Industrial Railway Record" resides with the Industrial Railway Society and the owners of the photographs and drawings contained in those articles.

  Return to the "Back Issues" index page.