Hi all! Can anyone tell me where I might find good drawings for various GWR railcars please? There might be a few out there but as always quality varies dramatically especially from online sources - difficult for me to know which are reliable! So any pointers here would be very much appreciated.
TIA,
Will.
Quote from: Will_J on November 10, 2025, 04:55:19 PMHi all! Can anyone tell me where I might find good drawings for various GWR railcars please? There might be a few out there but as always quality varies dramatically especially from online sources - difficult for me to know which are reliable! So any pointers here would be very much appreciated.
TIA,
Will.
Trust only photographs in my experience. Quality and accuracy are also not always tied. There are beautiful detailed and wrong drawings of many things, and old fuzzy blueprint ones that are sometimes more true to reality.
https://www.brmna.org/xrefs.shtml
is one good resource to start from for anything UK.
The search engine at the National Railway Museum has almost certainly got the blueprints. You can search for them online and reserve them to visit and look at. If it's for personal use you can also photograph them. They do have a " hire a researcher" service to do the legwork but it might be a lot dearer than the train/bus ride to the museum. I've spent many happy hours there unearthing absolute gems.
Great Western Diesel Railcars by J H Russell Wild Swan Publications
The History of the Great Western A E C Railcars by Colin Judge
Reprinted by Kevin Robertson under the Noodle Books imprint .
Will give you all the drawings ,photos and information you will find .
Both out of print unfortunately .
Bob
Plenty of used copies available, though
https://tinyurl.com/rz2fbkjm
Thank you so much all! Yes as always with drawings, you have to try to corroborate as much as you can from photographs!
If I'm very lucky, I might be able to borrow one of the large format scanners from work, that would certainly be the very best reference possible if I could get permission to scan them.
Will.