The keeper of the book

The Time Book is kept by Walter Emmott, checked by Nell Dewsnap, and illustrated where the record allows by Ted Buckley. It is a private desk, kept the way the works kept its own paperwork: every entry is dated, signed and checked against something that can be pointed to.

What the book is

A documented reading of a working works. The shops, the trades, the engines and the end of Gorton Locomotive Works, in Openshaw, Manchester, between 1848 and 1963, and of the men who served their time inside it. The book exists because a works that wrote everything down deserves to be read the way it wrote.

What the book does not claim

It is not the works, not a company and not a museum. It sells nothing, takes no bookings and holds no waiting list. Where the record is thin the entry says so. A name spelled the way a man spelled it himself beats a name corrected by somebody who was not there.

How an entry is kept

Each entry is argued from sources a reader can open: the published record of the railways, the surviving memoirs of the men, the collections that hold the drawings and the plates. The sources sit in the margin of every entry under Checked against, and a correction from a reader who was there outranks any of them.