[Articles and Clippings Relating to British Railways]

The Caledonian railway, or The Caley as it was fondly named, was a Scottish railway system that connected Scotland to London from the 1840’s until its dissolution in the 1920’s. This compilation of book excerpts, articles, news clippings, and advertisements chronicles and romanticizes the waning decades of the Caledonian Railway from the turn of the century until 1923 when The Caley was absorbed into the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway by The Railways Act of 1921, an act that streamlined 120 individual British railway systems into just four.

Thomas Norrell is the author of this loving assemblage. The contents date from the same period as the building of the new railroad bridge across the Clyde River, which increased tourism to the Scottish lake area. Norrell brings together a wide variety of printed matter into this one volume including news, human interest stories (like the transport of an elephant!), innovations, railway station profiles (“The Romance and Fascination of Railway Stations”), timetables, goods transport, tourist news, and mail delivery. Norrell left England as a young man and made a life in the United States in the early decades of the 20th Century. His childhood in England clearly shaped his love of trains. His collection of over 11,000 railroad photographs and ephemera was given to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s Archives Center. It is from that gift that this compilation most likely comes.