The construction seems to be progressing at a rapid pace and you can see the latest status of the development on a dedicated photostream on flickr.

Admitedly it doesn’t look much like a record office at the moment, that is not surprising as there is still another year to go before it opens for business, but it is great to see progress being made.

I like that the building work is being recorded (and being made available) so that we can watch this building site transform into an archive before our eyes.

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Network Rail Archive is not open to the public because they are “fully engaged in managing information to support the activities of the operational railway“. This is perhaps the most important thing to remember here, these may be historic documents but many of them are also engineering drawings for bridges and stations that are still in use today.

The documents are presented as a series of articles, along with historical background on the subject, such as a timeline or links to information on the railway company or engineer responsible.

This is a wonderful collection of documents, but there is probably little chance that the average family historian will find any information about their ancestors in the archive.

However most of these bridges, stations and tunnels were built by armies of labourers, if your ancestor was one of these labourers then the documents in the archive might give you a chance to see what it was they were working on.

The only drawback so far is the lack of documents from my neck of the woods. I would love to see some plans for Balcombe Viaduct on the Lonodn to Brighton mainline or details of some Sussex railway stations like Brighton or Bognor Regis.

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.