railways | Author, Jane Lark's stories

So, as happens sometimes, life events and health took over and the posts I had planned had to be pushed onto the back burner, but hopefully now I will have some time to write again.

As I said in my previous post, three of the things that lead me to ideas for books are people, places and pictures. Previously, I have told you about some of the people and one of the places, so let me carry on from where I left off and tell you about another place behind the GWR Girls series.

Number two on my list of places I have already mentioned, that is the STEAM – Museum of the Great Western Railway in Swindon, which was opened in the millennium year, 2000. It is positioned in the former GWR workshops. As I said in my last post, I visited the museum quite a few times. I took my daughter when she was small, and, when I worked for Swindon Borough Council who own the museum, I used to run training sessions and hold and attend meetings in the rooms in the museum. What I love about the set up there, is that there are lots of spaces where scenes of working life are recreated, in life size models, a captured moment in time, and not only that there are sounds. The museum plays the sounds appropriate to the scenes. Which means as a writer I have the opportunity to think, how would I describe that. Then there are the personal descriptions from the people who worked there, describing what they experienced. Also items that hint at the life of the people who worked there—the checking in pegs, the glass framed foremen’s offices on their stilts in the corners of the spaces. I love the life-size platform that is set up for the 1940s era, and I like sitting in the carriages.

Of course, for anyone with an engineering and technical brain there are plenty of actual trains to look around. But for me, with my overactive imagination, I just love the storytelling style of the museum. It has really brought things to life for me and many of the things I describe in my book I can only describe because I saw them in the museum.

There are more things I could say about inspirations I have gained from this museum but that would give away parts of the plot!

I would definitely recommend a visit, though.

As I said in my previous post, three of the things that lead me to ideas for books are people, places and pictures. Last time I told you about some of the people, over the next three days I will tell you about some of the places behind the GWR Girls series.

I have split the places up so I can include lots of pictures!

I grew up living near Swindon, in Shrivenham and then Faringdon. I often travelled into Swindon town. My father worked in a factory there. Then I started working in the town and for a couple of years I commuted daily before moving into Swindon when I was twenty-one. So, the Railway Village cottages, the hostel that was the old railway museum, and the park and swimming pool, were places I have known for as long as I can remember. However, despite having had a daughter who I took to the STEAM – Museum of the Great Western Railway a few times, I had never made the time to get to the small museum in Swindon’s historic Railway Village.

So, three years ago, I finally did make the time to go along and look around the beautiful, if compact, 34 Faringdon Road – the Railway Village Museum, that captures a moment in Victorian life in the Railway Village. The layout, though it is earlier than the date of my books, was still inspirational. For instance, I visited at Christmas and paperchains hung around the room, and of course they were using open fires as my families would have, and old stoves, as well as tin baths, and outside toilets. Seeing things in real life, feeling them and hearing them, does help a writer to bring things to life in words.

I have included a few photos so you can see what a perfect little time capsule of a museum this is on the inside. This gallery of pictures from the ground floor. The cottage is the layout I have used for Maggie’s family in the Great Western Railway Girls.

These images are from the ground floor, there are two original rooms on the ground floor of the foreman’s cottage and a lean-to extension that incorporated the outside water pipe and created a kitchen.

The below images are from the upstairs room. The foreman’s cottages have three bedrooms. It was a frequent reality that people rented out rooms, as Violet’s mother does in my story, to bring in more money.