The chances of you having a Victorian relative who worked on the railways is pretty high.
Railways were THE growth industry of the mid-late nineteenth century with even tiny villages being connected to the ever-increasing rail network.

The North West was at the centre of this burgeoning industry with the Rainhill trials, the Liverpool-Manchester railway and the huge amount of construction work in and around Liverpool.

Porters, platelayers, signalmen, guards, drivers, wheeltappers, coach builders, drivers, firemen, engineers . . . there was a plethora of occupations connected with the railways. And of course there were the people who built them - thousands of (mainly Irish) navvies laid mile upon mile of track at an astonishing speed. The pace of change must have been truly amazing for people who had been born in the eighteenth century. The sight of a locomotive charging through the countryside at (then) unimaginable speeds, linking towns within hours, must have been truly mind-blowing.

There are some very useful on-line resources and many publications which can help you track your railway ancestors. However, there is no national database of records and where they survive, staff records will be found in local or society collections.

You can start your research at http://www.railwayancestors.org.uk/
The purpose of the Railway Ancestors (Family History Society) is to help members trace their Family Ancestry in England, Scotland, Wales and
Ireland, and also British railwaymen overseas. One of the Society’s new publications contains more than 84,000 railway staff detail entries from the early 1800s to the late 1990s.

The National Railway Museum at York http://www.nrm.org.uk/home/home.asp also has a site which is well worth a visit. As well as the venue for a great day out it also has a massive archive of material on all things connected with life on the railways. However, the archive does not contain detailed staff records. These are held, where they exist, at the National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/researchguidesindex.asp?j=1The National Archives also publishes a book, Railway Records, which details all the railway records they hold. Another publication from National Archives is Railway Ancestors by David T. Hawkings.

A searchable database for railway ancestors in the Merseyside area can be found on the London and North Western Railway Society’s site - http://www.lnwrs.org.uk/ while the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Society’s site http://www.lyrs.org.uk/ is devoted to researching the history of the railway over its 75-year existence.

A very good book: "Was Your Grandfather a Railwayman." was published in 2002 by the Federation of Family History Societies. A further useful book if you are not familiar with railway employment is "The Victorian Railway Worker" published by Shire Publications.

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