VPRS 12903 Photographic Negatives: Railways: Box Systems

This series consists of photographic negatives created by the Victorian Railways. It encompasses mostly black and white glass plate or film negatives. Images depicted in this series include trains, rolling stock, stations and other railway facilities such as rail yards and bridges, publicity pictures, some documents such as graphs or maps, items such as badges or uniforms and a small number of staff.Between c 1990 and June 2000, all of the items in this series were maintained within a Photographic Collection that had been established by the Public Transport Corporation. This series is one of a number of series that have been created following transfer of the Photographic Collection to PROV.This particular series brings together two sequences of negatives which were created within discrete and, for a period, overlapping time frames. These sequences have been brought together to form this particular series because these were created as part of a similar record keeping process utilising a system of arrangement and control based on the photo boxes that originally housed them.In order to facilitate access and contribute to the long term preservation of the fragile originals, Photographic Collection staff began imaging a number of the negatives in this series in 1999. This program of imaging the Collection has been continued by PROV and is currently still under way.SEQUENCE AVAILABLE FOR ONLINE RESEARCHThe specific sequence and the consignment that has been processed and which can be viewed online is:Box number negatives: (held in the P1 consignment)This sequence consists mostly of black and white glass plate and film negatives. It also includes some copy negatives made of negatives from other sequences found elsewhere in other Photographic Collection series. It is currently unclear which part of the railways was responsible for the creation of this particular sequence.These negatives were numbered in a two number sequence ranging from 1- 2 to 703 - 72. (These have been listed in PROV systems with a forward slash. For example, image 218 - 10 is listed as 218/10.) It is unclear when this numbering sequence commenced but it is believed that the sequence was created between circa 1920 and at least 1983. For some reason that is unclear, box number range 500 - 511 inclusive has been repeated.Most of the images in this sequence have not been dated. Some of the dates included in the descriptions of negatives will identify when the image was taken (ie. the image was taken at the same time as the event, etc it depicts); other dates identify the subject of the image (i.e. the image was made many years after the event depicted but the date cited is of the event only). The earliest dated images in this sequence are of etchings depicting events in Melbourne during the Port Phillip District era (i.e. 1830s and 1840s). The most recent dated image is from 1983.SEQUENCE TO BE PROCESSEDThe other sequence of negatives to be processed as part of this series is:'A box number' negatives:This sequence dates from 1953 and consists mostly of black and white film negatives. The negatives in this sequence were also numbered in the same manner as the box negatives in the P1 consignment, however, an A prefix was added to the first number for each negative. This suggests that this sequence came to be either created or held by the same area of railways as the other sequence with the A prefix being added to distinguish one sequence from the other. A negative numbered 218A - 10, for example, would be identifiable as belonging to this sequence as opposed to 218 - 10 which would belong to the other sequence (in the P1 consignment).