At Ingrow West, the first stop on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway and still within the built-up area of Keighley, in West Yorkshire, is the station of Ingrow West.

At Ingrow the Vintage Carriages Trust have established the Museum of Rail Travel, a popular attraction for railway enthusiasts and casual visitors alike.

Here in the museum are railway artefacts and items of vintage coaching stock which have been restored to immaculate operational condition, and other items which are undergoing the long and painstaking process of rebuilding and restoration into their original condition.

There's plenty here for the enthusiast, collector and researcher, but on Sunday 13th October 2001 I came across a hidden treasure, one that I had overlooked on previous visits, and which was to transform my day out.

Following a chat with Paul Holroyd, one of the trustees of the VCT, I was shown into the magazine room, a treasure-house of railway literature dating back almost 100 years.

The magazine collection is kept in a centrally heated room located just off the main display hall and incorporates over 10,000 magazines, including some American and German titles. The oldest magazine present on the day of my visit was a copy of the Railway Magazine, dated September 1902. The magazines are priced according to a preset, and very fair, pricing structure. The collection includes not only magazines, but timetables, pamphlets and other items of railway interest.

The VCT have been selling magazines to raise funds for their core activity of rolling stock restoration since 1968. The premises at Ingrow were opened in 1990 and the magazine room was opened in 1995. There are currently 586 members on the rolls with about 10% of those involved on a practical basis. The trust have recently brought out a CD-ROM database of British Railway carriages which lists around 3,500 items of stock ranging from relics awaiting restoration to carriages working regularly on both preserved and main-line railways in the U.K. The CD is continuously updated with the latest material for each production run.

The collection is a great boon for researchers and is much more accessible than those in some of the official public archives. You can buy the archive material, do your research and even donate it back to them when you have finished!

Like all the Trust's activities, the collection is professionally managed and is well worth a visit. It is unlikely that you will come away without a large bundle of these interesting historical treasures.