Victorian Railways Photographs
From Public Record Office Victoria
H (Historical) series (VPRS 12800 P1)
This sequence consists mostly of black and white film and glass plate negatives. It also includes a number of copy negatives made of negatives from other sequences found elsewhere in this and other Photographic Collection series.
Negatives in this sequence depict engines, carriages, stations, facilities, people (mostly portraits of Railways staff) and events (such as railway accidents and Royal visits) deemed to be "historical". Some images depict Victorian Railways documents such as tickets, timetables, notices, menu cards, instructions and rules. Also included are negatives showing overseas images, presumably taken from publications.
These negatives were numbered H1000 - H5568. No negatives were allocated numbers within the range H1 - H999. It is unclear when this numbering sequence commenced. One possibility is that the sequence was initially put together as part of the production of a publication relating to the history of Victoria's railways such as Leo Harrigan's "VR to 62". Images continued to be added to this sequence until 2000.
A number of the images have not been dated. The dates included in the descriptions of negatives in this sequence are mostly of the subjects. The earliest subject in this sequence goes back to the 1830's. (The very few images of this era are invariably of overseas subjects.) The most recent subject dates from 1988.
