In recent years, railways have undergone a remarkable renaissance in Europe—night train lines have been (re-)established, the high-speed rail network continues to grow, and in the continent’s effort to reduce CO2 emissions, railways play a key role in the much-needed reform of the transportation sector. However, persistent issues like delays and cancellations highlight the consequences of the long-term neglect of railway infrastructure in many European countries today. Inspired by the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825, a series of events and exhibitions will celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of modern railways in Great Britain and all around the world in 2025. So, how should we commemorate the 200th anniversary of the railways? A good starting point to explore this question is a unique location on the British Isles where the past, present, and future of this transformative transport technology converge: the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York.

Upon entering the main exhibition hall (Figure 1), it’s hard not to be awestruck by the sight of early British steam locomotives from the period of the Industrial Revolution standing alongside a Japanese Shinkansen bullet-train from the 1970s and a Eurostar train inside a cross-section of the Eurotunnel. As in most railway museums, rolling stock dominates the exhibition space. Yet once we shift our gaze away from the imposing locomotives in the Great Hall, we encounter a clue that invites us to complicate a celebration driven by large technological objects: a massive plaque commemorating the railway centenary in 1925.
This two-by-three-metre plaque, designed by Italo Amerigo Passani of Carrara (1882–1963) and ‘presented to the British Nation by the Italian Railwaymen’, was originally displayed at the Railway Pavilion of the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1925 and later loaned to the Science Museum (Figure 2). At its centre is a bronze medallion depicting George Stephenson (1781–1848), the British railway engineer who, along with his son Robert, built Locomotion No. 1, the first-ever passenger train, used in the 1825 opening of the Stockton and Darlington line. Supporting the medallion are ‘two relief figures representing Italian railwaymen, one a shunter with shunter’s horn, and the other a permanent way worker with hammer’, as the digital collection platform of the Science Museum notes.1 The latter figure in particular symbolizes an entire sector of railway labour that has largely remained in the shadows of history. Who were these people keeping the railways running 24/7, and what practices shaped their daily work? This question marks the starting point of my current research project.

Cultures and Costs of Maintenance
Maintenance and repair are among the defining ways in which people interact with technology, and yet there are still significant gaps in their historiography.2 My DFG-funded postdoc project, ‘Cultures and Costs of Maintenance: The Rise of Creosote and its Precarious Legacy’, targets precisely this gap, merging maintenance history with material history. The analysis follows creosote—a toxic coal tar oil mainly used for impregnating wooden railway sleepers—through various historical contexts from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the daily work of railway maintenance crews, addresses occupational health concerns, and sheds light on the circulation of maintenance knowledge with a transnational scope, including in Germany, Austria, and Great Britain, while also accounting for global material flows. It explores the operations of wood impregnation plants (which later often became contaminated sites) and examines the daily maintenance and repair work on railway tracks in Europe and its colonies, including India, China, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Additionally, it traces the journeys of old railway sleepers, repurposed in garden allotments or discarded in illegal landfills. The project views maintenance history through a transnational and long-term historical lens, tracing the journeys of related materials from their mobilization to their afterlife.3 It illuminates the life cycles of technology beyond the established focus on innovation, and connects them with current questions of environmental history, material history, and new/neo-materialism.
After spending two years researching my German and Austrian case studies, the generous GHIL scholarship finally allowed me to delve into the origins of the story in Great Britain. At the GHIL, I greatly appreciated the stimulating discussions during the colloquium, as well as the engaging conversations over lunch and the lively exchanges at post-colloquium gatherings. The core of my archival research was conducted in the National Archives in Kew, which provided extensive records on pre-nationalization railway companies and their successors (the RAIL series), as well as a wealth of publications previously housed in the British Transport Historical Records Office library (ZLIB). As the files showed, British railway infrastructure was a truly transnational material assemblage: in the 1930s, the timber for railway sleepers (Figure 3), for example, was imported not only from the Baltics but also from British Columbia, before it was treated in high-pressure vacuum vessels with coal tar oil of British origin. My investigation focused mainly on historical occupational health hazards for maintenance staff, the risks of working in active traffic zones (Figure 4),4 and the use and legacy of toxic materials. These included creosote in sleepers, herbicides used since the 1920s for vegetation control, and even the threat posed by faeces dropped from passing trains—a problem that was only gradually addressed from the late 1980s. In other words, while the technological infrastructure was looked after, in many cases, the bodies of the maintenance workers were not.

© Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Photo and text content reproduced under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

Researching Global Maintenance History in the NRM’s Search Engine
On my longest excursion outside London, I met Dr Oliver Betts, Research Lead at the NRM in York. After we discussed the challenges faced by technology museums in preserving and exhibiting the toxic infrastructural environments in which maintenance staff worked, he introduced me to another treasure stored in the railway museum’s library and archival section (called the ‘Search Engine’): the complete journals and reports of proceedings of the Permanent Way Institution (PWI). The PWI was founded in 1884 as a forum for engineers and maintainers of railway infrastructure alike, and over time it set up sections throughout Great Britain and later also in its colonies. It is important to emphasize that, just as the contributions of railway maintenance workers have often remained in the shadows of history, the sources documenting their practices are frequently challenging to identify and recover—if such documentation exists at all. PWI section reports from British India and the Federated Malay States, offer a reminder of the importance of critically engaging with maintenance practices within specific historical contexts. What infrastructure systems were maintained, and what purposes did they serve? Where did these systems enable and reinforce exploitative practices in terms of labour and resources, and where did they allow for social mobility, knowledge transfer, or successful appropriation?
Railway maintenance work in the early twentieth century was often physically demanding. It not only involved heavy manual track work but also required inspection tours of fifteen to twenty kilometres by foot or trolley, undertaken in all weather conditions and sometimes even at night. Such conditions could result in exploitative practices, particularly in colonial settings. The following caption, which accompanies a photograph of a railway inspection trolley in a historical report in the PWI journal, illustrates the precarious working conditions under British rule in India:5
Inspection Trolley in India, the permanent way inspector’s mode of travelling over his section. The four men standing are a team who work in relays, two at a time, running bare-footed on the rails pushing the trolley. Having gained speed, the runners spring on to the trolley, and jump back on to the rails when further momentum is needed.
The maintenance and management of railway systems in most colonies were inconceivable without the labour of local populations. While British platelayers initially employed to construct railways in India often transitioned to maintenance roles after the completion of the lines, their representation in the sector had diminished significantly by the turn of the century. By the 1920s, locals frequently also assumed leadership roles in the maintenance sector, as statistics from the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway illustrate. Of the 200 Permanent-Way inspectors and their assistants, 68 per cent were registered as ‘Indian’, while 32 per cent were categorized as ‘Domiciled Europeans’ and ‘Anglo-Indians’.6 While this distribution might have varied in other colonies, a photograph from a 1922 meeting of the Permanent Way Institution section for the Federated Malay States in Kuala Lumpur similarly demonstrates that, over time, members of the local population were able to attain higher positions, managing the operations and maintenance of the established railway system.7 While I cannot fully contextualize these case studies here, they effectively demonstrate the value of this printed source as a long historical series that enabled me to trace changes in maintenance practices over time and provided deeper insights into the (post-)colonial dimensions of maintenance history.
As we celebrate ‘Railway 200’, the bicentenary of the modern railway in the UK this year, we should broaden our focus beyond the planners of railway systems and builders of large rolling stock and move past the opening ceremonies. As this brief reflection highlights, the history of modern railways is intricately connected to global material flows and their long-term legacies, imperial ambitions, and the diverse workforce that made the construction, operation, and maintenance of this transport infrastructure possible. Examining the material choices and maintenance practices of the past offers valuable insights for contemporary discussions on the future of railway transport over the next century. And who knows? Perhaps by then another bronze plaque will more explicitly adorn the NRM’s Great Hall, honouring the often overlooked maintainers who dedicated themselves to keeping the trains running around the globe, day and night, come rain or shine.
Feature Image: The entrance to the National Railway Museum in York. Photo by Webbedduck. Published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
- ‘Bronze plaque, commemorative of the railway centenary celebrations at Darlington, 1925’, 925-733 Science Museum Group Collection Online. [↩]
- Maintenance and repair studies has in recent years emerged as a new field of interdisciplinary inquiry, and has received increased attention in the history of technology, science and technology studies (STS), sociology, social anthropology, and media studies. This is also highlighted by the 2024 theme of the joint annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology and the International Committee for the History of Technology: ‘Reparando / Repair in the History of Technology’. Some recent landmark publications are Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, The Innovation Delusion: How our Obsession with the New has Disrupted the Work that Matters Most (New York, 2020); Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims, Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power (Cambridge, MA, 2020). [↩]
- Martin Meiske, ‘Empire, Extraction, and Externalization: Wood Impregnation in Early Twentieth Century Bosnia and Herzegovina and its Precarious Legacy’, in Borna Fuerst-Bjeliš et al. (eds.), Environmental Histories of the Dinaric Karst (Cham, 2024), 377–99; Martin Meiske, ‘Tracing Creosote’s Legacy: From the Rails of Europe to Unplanned Deposits’, Technology and Culture, 66/3 (2025), 777–98. [↩]
- See also ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’, an outstanding collaborative project between the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum, and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, researching railway worker accidents in Britain and Ireland from the late 1880s to 1939. [↩]
- H. C. Muggeridge, ‘The Permanent Way Man’s Job in India’, Permanent-Way Institution Journal and Reports of Proceedings, 62/2 (1944), 48–56, at 50. [↩]
- A. R. Stuart, ‘Permanent Way Folk of Southern India’, Permanent-Way Institution Journal and Reports of Proceedings, 43/2 (1925), 186–99. [↩]
- ‘Minutes of Sections and Photograph of F. M. S. Section’, Permanent-Way Institution Journal and Reports of Proceedings, 40/3 (1922), 202–14, at 207. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Martin Meiske (July 31, 2025). How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and Colonialism. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved November 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14g98
