Diagrams, deers and decor: lighting represented in railway engineering archives

The Wolverton Works archive contains thousands of drawings of carriages, wagons and early locomotives. It also, rather surprisingly, contains a large number of light fitting designs. This is because as well as just the engineering of the vehicles, the works also produced fittings for inside them.

These fittings were bound to be decorative and exuberant; the works produced private carriages for wealthy individuals, first class carriages and even the carriages for the royal family such as this deer shaped dining car bracket below.


Reference: WOLV 3-6-20


Reference number: Roll 53


These drawings show the design process behind some of these lights. A ‘directional photometer’ was used to measure how light was reflected off different lampshades and the result is pretty striking.


Reference number: WOLV 6/1446


Reference number: WOLV 6/1444


You can come and see the Wolverton archive for yourself. The archive catalogue is listed on this page under ‘Wolverton Works’ and details of how to come and view material in Search Engine can be found here

Filed under: Library and archive collections, Research Tagged: dining saloon, directional photometer, interior design, lamps, lampshades, London Midland and Scottish Railway, pullman, sleeping car, sleeping saloon, wolverton works

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