The office

Every works had an office at the gate where the books were kept. This page is ours. It lists what the entries rest on, and how a reader adds to the record instead of just reading it.

What the entries rest on

The book leans on the published record first: the standard histories of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, the Great Central and the LNER, the engineering record kept by Grace's Guide, the LNER encyclopedia's class files, and the collections at the Science Museum Group that hold works drawings and plates. Second it leans on the memoirs of the men who served their time at the Tank, including the apprentice account kept by the earlier gorton-tank.com site between 2003 and 2011.

Corrections and names

A roll call is only finished when the men themselves have read it. If you or your family served at the works, the shed, the carriage and wagon shops or the canal depot, and an entry has a name wrong, a date wrong, or a man missing, the correction goes in the book. Send it with whatever proves it: a works photograph, a wage slip, an apprenticeship indenture, or simply the way the man himself always spelled it.

Copyright of the record

The words here are written for this book. The historical record belongs to nobody, and the photographs are credited to their collections where a source survives.