ARCHIVE NEWS
An area which has received little coverage in the columns of ‘Omnibus’ is the archives and we will endeavour to put that omission right. That the Museum is paying due attention to the archives is important in two respects, not only because we are now a registered museum and are required to document the treasures we have but also to reassure the many kind souls that their donations are being looked after.
Last year Phil Ireland and Malcolm Keeley made heavy inroads into cataloguing the Museum’s large collection of transport books although some work remains.
The observant amongst those who have been on site in the last few months will have noticed most buses have been without their destination blinds for a week or so at some stage during that period. This is because Bob Williamson has volunteered to catalogue all our blinds, both those in store and in the buses, so we will have a comprehensive list of what we have and the contents of each one. You would have had to be even more observant to notice what another new volunteer on site is doing! Andrew Turner is cataloguing the technical manuals we have and the main visible impact of his work is that manuals move from place to place within the railway carriages.
Mike Jordan has been mounting the Trust’s extensive collection of Midland Red photos onto cards and cataloguing them. The rest of the Trust’s photo collections are held by Mike Jordan and Malcolm Keeley. They are in alphabetical and then numerical order but the actual process of cataloguing them all will be a massive task. Malcolm is also beginning the mammoth task of pairing each negative acquired from Alan B Cross with a print.
You may recall that, a year or two ago, Dave Taylor arranged for many of the Midland Red technical drawings to be copied and filed onto computer. He has subsequently been working with other collections to exchange information and drawings.
Over the winter Malcolm Keeley merged three donated collections of timetable leaflets. This combined archive gives us excellent coverage of the West Midlands operators for the twenty years after WMPTE adopted leaflets, following the takeover of Midland Red’s local services.
Chapel Lane, Wythall, Worcs B47 6JX
Tel : 01564 826471 e-mail us
A registered educational charity no 507191
