A Mainline Station Heritage Artefacts Collection launched

eldomtom2 · Dec 16, 2025

Thought this is presumably of interest to this site (I'm not involved):

https://stationheritageartefacts.org.uk/

This website was set up by Daniel Wright, author and editor of thebeautyoftransport.com and a long-time enthusiast for heritage artefacts at railway stations on the National Rail network. These are the small pieces of heritage which tell the story of the railway station where they can be found, as well as the railway more generally. After recording hundreds of examples, and finding that people were fascinated to learn about heritage artefacts at their own (and other) stations, he decided to share his findings more widely.

Railway buildings get a lot of attention, but the smaller items of railway heritage at stations are threatened, largely because no-one knows exactly where they are, or what they are. This thebeautyoftransport.com article looked at the problem.

London Underground already has a register of the heritage assets at its stations, but there is no equivalent on the National Rail network (mostly, but not exclusively, the Network Rail-owned stations). That’s not because the railway industry doesn’t care, but is due to historic reasons and resource constraints. There are various plans to tackle this, but in the meantime information on the existence of small heritage artefacts at railway stations isn’t centrally recorded, and is very much incomplete. Yet a lot of it is already on the internet, in a dispersed and disorganised way.

Historic England’s “Enrich the List” campaign in particular inspired Daniel to set up this website. “Enrich the List” invited users to submit photographs of listed buildings and their historic features, to enhance the statutory listing citations Historic England’s website already hosted. This includes listed railway stations, and pictures/details of many heritage artefacts at listed stations can be found on the “Enrich the List” pages. It seemed like a potentially useful model, but heritage artefacts can be found at many railway stations that are not listed, so the “Enrich the List” project was not the complete answer.

Various other heritage artefacts at stations have been photographed and shared online, via Wikimedia Commons, geograph, blogs and social media accounts. But these are hard to search for, and spread across multiple sites, so again this isn’t satisfactory.

Daniel initially just wanted to share his own collection of images of heritage artefacts at stations, mostly through lack of anything better to do with them. And then he thought…

Maybe other people would like to share their collections, and help create a single site specialising in celebrating heritage artefacts at mainline railway stations?

If that sounds like you, click here to find out how to join in.
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A Mainline Station Heritage Artefacts Collection launched

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A Mainline Station Heritage Artefacts Collection launched

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