Catalogue description The Box Family collection of railway photographs

The work of the Box family, the collection includes many photographs of the Southern Railway's Portsmouth to London line, with coverage of electrics, steam locomotives, drivers and stations; views of GWR locomotives at Salisbury, Yeovil, and Birmingham, of LNER trains at King's Cross and the LMS at Oban and the Kyle of Lochalsh in Scotland; rare wartime images show trains passing through Winchester and Micheldever in April and May 1943; Frank Box also photographed the Ffestinlog Railway, the Weston, Clevedon & Portishead Railway, and the Liverpool Centenary exhibition of 1925; included too are a few views of LSWR lines in Devon in 1907, featuring trains, stations, junctions and cuttings.

Approximately 880 negatives have been listed, giving details of location, company, date, locomotive type, number and, occasionally, time of day. Lists are in numerical sequence, divided into the work of the three photographers.

Box family

Most of the photographs were taken by Frank Box between 1907 and 1953, with the main emphasis on the period from 1930 to 1953. The collection contains photographs credited to Frank's son, Donovan. These mainly feature the LSWR, Southern and the SECR, with views of stations, trains, bridges and the London, Devon and Portsmouth lines. However, as certain photographs of LSWR and Southern Railway trains on the Portsmouth line were taken as early as 1906, some were perhaps the work of Frank's father, Wilfred Box. He was Assistant Engineer of the Liverpool Overhead Railway and also took a small number of photographs showing Southern lines in Devon during the 1930s.