Qualla: Museum of the Great Western Railway

Museum of the Great Western Railway: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BazzaDaRambler, CC BY 2.0. The walls of the museum are made from stone dug out of the Box Tunnel. Isambard Kingdom Brunel's great two-mile bore through Box Hill west of London was the most ambitious engineering project of his Great Western Railway, and the squared rubble left over from blasting it became, in 1842, the walls of the engineering workshop now housing STEAM - the Museum of the Great Western Railway. Behind those walls, for almost a century and a half, men built and rebuilt locomotives at a rate that no other works in Britain could match. At its peak, Swindon Works turned out three locomotives a week. It was one of the largest railway works in the world.

Image: BazzaDaRambler | CC BY 2.0

Museum of the Great Western Railway: Brunel's Town

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:My another account, CC BY-SA 3.0. Swindon barely existed as a town when Brunel decided to put his locomotive works here in the early 1840s. He chose the spot for engineering reasons - it was where his broad-gauge railway from London met the steep climb up to the Cotswolds, the place a fresh locomotive needed to b...

Image: en:User:My another account | CC BY-SA 3.0

Museum of the Great Western Railway: The Locomotives

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BazzaDaRambler, CC BY 2.0. Inside the museum sit a remarkable line-up. North Star is a replica of an early broad-gauge locomotive of the GWR Star Class - the type that hauled the first GWR services in the 1830s. The 2301 Class 2516, built in 1897, is one of William Dean's elegant goods engines. The 4073 Cl...

Image: BazzaDaRambler | CC BY 2.0

Museum of the Great Western Railway: Female Boilersmiths

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Murgatroyd49, CC BY-SA 4.0. The most striking thing about the museum is that it tells the social story alongside the engineering. A photograph in the gallery shows women working as boilersmiths at Swindon Works in 1943. The men were away at war, and the work of the railway did not pause - so women picked up...

Image: Murgatroyd49 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum of the Great Western Railway: The Site Today

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of the old works buildings have been repurposed. The McArthurGlen Designer Outlet now occupies the great brick-and-stone sheds where the locomotives were built, and shoppers walk past restored gantries and pillars that once supported overhead cranes. The National Trust's nat...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum of the Great Western Railway: Reconstructions and Archives

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hugh Llewelyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Throughout the museum, lifelike reconstructions show areas of work that the actual workshops once contained: an office with paper records and Bakelite telephones; a stores counter with the kind of carefully sorted brass fittings that a foreman might demand by part number; a works...

Image: Hugh Llewelyn | CC BY-SA 2.0