Drawings and Documents

On this page you will find links to download a selection of documents from the CRA’s collection. These have been selected to assist modellers and other researchers and the selection is necessarily limited to those of a reasonable physical size – some may be in two or more parts to permit printing out on A4 size.

Digital downloads

Infrastructure drawings – buildings, track plans, etc.

The CRA holds a substantial collection of plans, originally microfilmed from documents rescued by the late Dr Michael Andrews from the clearance of the former FR offices at Barrow in the 1960s – and added to from other sources. More recently these have been scanned to produce digital files which are available to members and other researchers. Most originals were deposited by Dr Andrews in the Cumbria County Record Office at Barrow in the 1970s.

Plans are usually supplied as jpeg files emailed to your personal address, though large orders may be supplied by post on CD. Images have been scanned from microfilms and are in monochrome only. All images will processed to remove any wider black margins and to improve contrast. The originals of many plans have been stored in rolls and a strip at one end may be very dirty and unreadable. Plans can only be supplied unseen at the purchaser’s risk but please email any queries to our Archivist.

Note that some plans have been filmed and scanned in two or more sections and each section counts as one image. These are identified in the plans list with suffixes A, B, C, etc. A4-size prints may also be supplied but on copies of large plans much detail may be unreadable. Prices and minimum orders are as for photographic prints.

Digital files are available from our Archivist only as full size of the trimmed scan at £1 each. Minimum order £5.

Vehicle drawings: Furness Railway

The vehicle drawings are from the Association’s collection originally prepared by Ross Pochin or Bill Shillcock. Click on the buttons below to view each category.

Paper copies of Documents

The Association has a large collection of historical documents, mainly relating to operational matters, from which paper copies are available. The documents have a wide geographical spread across the whole county and cover a wide time-span from original Acts of Parliament to BR internal communications from the 1950s and 1960s. There is a good collection of working timetables and their appendices, trip working and special traffic notices, as well as some which defy categorisation. These documents will be of interest to the researcher, the modeller, or anyone interested in the railways of Cumbria. The documents listed complement, but do not duplicate, those available as digital downloads

Original versions of documents such as these can command very high prices at auction or railwayana sales. Whilst the purchaser will not end up with a document that is ‘collectable’ in the accepted sense, the high-quality copies on sale provide a plethora of historical information at little more than the price of copying and postage.