Celebrating railway history through sharing photos of heritage artefacts at British railway stations, old and new

A new book is about to be published that examines the architecture of the Big Four railway companies during the interwar years.

A book documenting the architectural evolution of British Mainline Railway Stations (1923-1947)

Have you ever had a project you’ve started on without any idea of the scale of work you’ve just committed to? Well, if you want to know one of the reasons that I haven’t been writ…

Can public transport be beautiful? Daniel Wright runs a whole website claiming it certainly can! From architecture to typefaces, posters to tickets...the charm and good design of our buses, stations, ...

In a blaze of publicity, the branding for Great British Railways, state-owned future operator of some of the privatised British railway network, was unexpectedly launched earlier this month, a mere…

In a blaze of publicity, the branding for Great British Railways, state-owned future operator of some of the privatised British railway network, was unexpectedly launched earlier this month, a mere four years after Great British Railways was first announced. In typical British transport policy tradition, the government almost immediately undermined its own efforts to create a unifying visual identity for the English railway network, having long since ceded the battle to brand the British railway network.

I have been thinking *a lot* about heritage artefacts at mainline railway stations over the last few years. They are so important in telling the story of the railway station at which they are located (and quite often the history of the wider railway industry), yet frequently go unrecognised and unprotected. They are often very beautiful things in their own right, as well.

Railway stations, bus stations and... filling stations? The first two have made frequent appearances on the pages of this website, the third far less often. Filling stations, and their close cousins garages and car showrooms, only occasionally attract significant architectural attention. Although it can happen from time to time (there's a list of filling stations that have featured here at the end of this article) most of them were built quickly and without particular thought to their appearance; certainly in more recent decades.

Thanet Parkway station opened on 31 July 2023, and promptly broke quite a few people's brains. I can remember my Twitter feed (as was) being awash with commentators deriding its appearance. Even now, a simple web search will quickly turn up adjectives like "ugly", "hideous", "bloody ugly" and "incredibly dull-looking". ↑ Thanet Parkway. Photo by Daniel Wright [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0…