NEW JANUARY 2024.  In June 1957 British Railways held an exhibition of passenger rolling stock at Battersea Wharf. Its main aim was to inform the public of moderrnisatuion in that respect, and featured the prototypes of planned new items.  As well as the latest locomotives and carriages, the Wickham two-car diesel unit was on display.

You get two separate files here. The first is the 24-page booklet which visitors received. It starts with an account of the progress of the Modernisation Plan generally. The main part has photograsphs of most of the items on show plus descriptions of every one. There is also a plan of the exhibition showing where the exhibits were located.

The second file gives contemporary reports of the Exhibition. Pathé had produced a short newsreel of the event, and a link is given to that on YouTube.  The British Railways Magazine for August 1957 featured just over a page with an illustrated account of the exhibition, and this is also included in the file (derived from our scans of the complete Eastern Region editions). Finally the Locomotive Magazine for that month also acknowledged the occasion - it gave very few details of the actual Exhibition, but devoted much of the issue to providing details of the new prototype coaches and the Wickham DMU that were on display. The file concludes with eight of those pages (taken from Part 3 of our scans of every edition of the magazine that ever appeared from 1896 to 1959).

The files are word-searchable and have been provided with bookmarks. They will both be available to download as soon as payment has been made. You go to your account and click on ‘Downloads’. New customers create an account as they place their order.