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Bill Peto is well respected - renowned even - for his knowledge of Great Western Railway matters. He combines his role as the Historical Research Officer of the Great Western Society with a genuine enthusiasm for all things GWR, and over the years has amassed a remarkable amount of detailed information, most of it from official records and sources.
Foremost among Bill?s reference material are copies of the official Swindon Registers. He has cross-referenced the information from these documents with other GWR records to produce a staggeringly comprehensive and highly accurate set of listings, charting the entire life histories (often day by day!) of virtually every standard gauge GWR locomotive that ever was. Allocations, repairs, modifications, boiler and tender changes, accidents - the listings reveal all. And now, for the very first time, Bill Peto had made them available for publication.It would, of course, be impossible to include full details of every GWR locomotive in a single book and to do full justice to the astonishing amount of detailed information which has been collated over so many years, we propose to publish all the Peto Registers in a series of volumes, each dealing in depth with one or two classes or types.
While the listings will form the basis of each volume, we will also be covering in detail other aspects such as the background, development and the working lives of the locomotives in question. For these topics, Bill Peto has collaborated with Martin Smith, who has scoured primary and secondary sources for as many details as possible of contemporary events. If, for example, a GWR Traffic Committee Minute included a report of a locomotive having some unconventional treatment meted out, or an ancient copy of The Railway Magazine commented on an unusual working, Smith has had the task of finding the information and conducting further research.
We are plucky enough to suggest that the Peto-Smith collaboration will not only reveal much hitherto unpublished material, but will also result in the most comprehensive books yet published about GWR locomotives.
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