We specialise in selling files of documents. These are listed in the Files Emporium – you either download the files directly, or you buy them on CDs and DVDs which will be posted to you.

A number of printed items are also available from us, as well as magazine binders. These are listed in the Sales List.

Separately we offer a selection of over 2500 photographs too, supplied as JPGs for 25p each with a minimum order of £1. These depict both locomotives and locations, mostly dating from around the late 1950s. In addition to the GER section, many of the former LNER lines apart from the GCR get some coverage.

Yes (apart from the binders, that is!). Every printed item in the Sales List has a much cheaper PDF equivalent in the Files Emporium.

They’re easy to find, too. Suppose you want the file corresponding to Information Sheet M420 on basic ticket office procedure. Simply go to the Files Emporium and put ‘M420’ in the search box. Hit Search and you’ll be taken straight to it – File RC019: BR(E) Basic Ticket Office Procedure 1969.

By no means – most are unique to the Files Emporium. There are about a thousand more items available in the Files Emporium than in the Sales List. There are a huge number of files which we could not offer in printed form, often because they contain far too many pages to make printing feasible.

 Yes of course, so long as you’re a member.  If your problem is that the original copy has arrived damaged or not arrived at all, however, there is a different route to seek a free remedy. It is described in the column of small print on page 3 of every Journal.

For past Journals we offer J1-200 complete as a download or on a DVD. For individual issues the quick, cheap and easy way is to go to the Files Emporium and order a PDF for 50p. They are good quality files complete with bookmarks, and the most recent ones are derived from the files sent to the printers.

If a ‘real’ Journal is important to you, as with all printed items you must go via the Sales List. Typically they cost £2.50 plus an amount to cover the ever-increasing postage (sent second class). If the Journal you require is an early one which is out of print (indicated in the Sales List by an asterisk), we will usually supply a second-hand copy in at least fair condition. Very rarely the best we can do is a reprinted replica.

Yes, with pleasure.  Non-members are more than welcome to buy items from us, with just two exceptions: sales of copies of the GERS Journal and News are restricted to our members.  That is to respect the copyright requirements of some of our contributors.

 

That’s because Journals are for members only. If they were downloadable, non-members could acquire them. To avoid that, we have to do a manual check that you are indeed a member and then we send you your Journal by WeTransfer or similar. This means a delay of 24 hours at the very most, though usually it is a lot less than that.

We have divided the files into 24 separate Categories. You will see these in a vertical column on the left-hand side of every page in the Files Emporium.

They are listed alphabetically. The first one is Section CD, which contains all our DVDs and CDs. The next is Section DL, which lists all the download versions of the DVDs. Then comes DS – scale drawings. Others follow such as LM – Locomotives, Rolling Stock and Shipping; RE – Railways: Engineering, Infrastructure and Track; RG – Railways: Guides and Locations; SG – Signalling Topics; and TO – Trains, Operating them and Organising them. We end with TW – Working Timetables. We recommend you take a look and see what there is.

Some files do not fit neatly into just one Category, in which case we may list them in more than one. Thus in SG we include examples such as LM074 ‘From the Cab 2019-2023’ – a series of articles written by a Greater Anglia driver based at Colchester whose turns take him over the Fens as far as Peterborough, and some of whose comments might prove of interest to present-day signalling enthusiasts. The files are listed alphabetically, so here this precedes SG001.

For using the Files Emporium, we suggest either browsing through a chosen Category or else going to the search facility to look for a particular location or topic.

To see all the latest additions, go to the Files Emporium home page. In the red-bordered box just below the search window, in the top line there is a blue link to click on.

If you enter a word in the box and press the button marked with a magnifying glass, it looks for any matches among all the titles and their descriptions plus a box I have available to enter any other words I can think of for that item. It cannot do a word-search of the item itself.

The finds then all come up, listed in alphabetic order of their codes. Thus in the case of Wymondham the 19 finds go LM051, LM059, MP017 .... followed by more items in the MP, RC, RH, RR, TO, TP and finally TW series.

If you are looking for any GER location, please remember that it is bound to feature also in MP001 (the 1919 GER system maps) and in several public and working timetables in Sections TP and TW. In each of these cases there is no way the names of every station on the GER could be listed within the titles, descriptions or my extra box, so it will not come up in the search. Your only way of finding those ones is to browse through the timetables.

Likewise there may be an article of interest in one of the magazines we do – the Locomotive Magazine, Railway & Travel Monthly, ‘Railways’, Railway World and the like. Such references won’t come up in the search either, but generally their descriptions include a link to see their full contents list which is itself word-searchable.

Avoid looking for ‘Wymondham station’. You would get 43 finds, but most of them are clearly irrelevant. It probably starts with any items where it finds both words, then it focuses its attention on looking for just one word such as ‘RG023 Quy station’. For some reason the 43 items found do include some but by no means all the 19 that actually have ‘Wymondham’ in them. If you wanted King’s Lynn, for instance you are advised to search just for Lynn – lest you miss entries for Kings Lynn without the apostrophe. You can of course search for topics rather than places, such as ticket or freight.

 

We have many scale drawings in Sections LG and DS, which you are advised to browse.

If you are interested in early GER or even ECR locomotives, we would refer you to our extracts from the Locomotive Magazine in LM.DL.  These are illustrated with over 300 drawings – they show only a side view and are undimensioned, but are to scale, and you can scale all your measurements from their wheel base and diameters, which are always given in the articles.  You are also supplied with enlarged JPG files of each one which you can print out on A4 paper.

One other potentially very useful item is file NX021, a comprehensive index with an East Anglian flavour to drawings which appeared in the model railway press between 1925 and 2000 – locomotives, rolling stock, lineside features and buildings.  If anyone would like to contribute a Part 2 covering the next quarter of a century, that would be welcome!

 

Yes, plenty – about very early railways, for example, and about BR’s Modernisation Plan. There are also periodicals such as the Locomotive Magazine, Railway and Travel Monthly, ‘Railways’ and Railway World.

To see a full list of such items, go to the Files Emporium home page. In the red-bordered box just below the search window, in the bottom line there is a blue link to click on.

This is easily done, so watch out for it.

The problem is simple to resolve. Just to the right of the rogue 2 in the shopping cart are two buttons. Either can do the job for you. The red one with the x removes that item completely from your cart, so you can start again. The blue button is perhaps quicker: change the 2 to a 1, then press that button to update the cart.

It’s not uncommon for us to see two copies ordered – and paid for – apparently unawares. A refund of a small amount makes no commercial sense: we get nothing whatsoever for that item, but have to pay commission fees on it twice, once to receive it and a second time as we send it back. When I spot it, therefore, I usually offer the customer a choice of a different file instead.

Basically the options are PayPal, either directly or by using Google Pay or Apple Pay, or Nochex.

If you have a PayPal account you wish to use, that seems to work fine. PayPal can also handle card payments by inviting you to continue as a guest, but our experiences of this are rather more mixed. Sometimes the payment proceeds without incident, but occasionally our customer gets hassle – the worst of these is when, apparently at random, the company decides to do a check on the transaction, presumably to guard against money laundering. The outcome is that your order is described as ‘pending’ rather than ‘complete’, and no download is released. They then keep you waiting for a couple of days or so before clearing the payment and finally accepting the order.

Nochex is a reputable British company who specialise in handling card payments. We added them as an option after a series of unfortunate difficulties with PayPal, and they have created no problems whatsoever for our buyers. If we were making a card payment ourselves, we would certainly go down this route.

It should be, unless your order totals less than £1 – PayPal takes payments from a penny upwards (though it would charge us around 30p in commission to do that!), but Nochex starts at £1.

If you are purchasing a file which costs pence, therefore, the only way to avoid PayPal is to add a second file to bring your order to £1 or more.

This refers to your billing address. As we interpret it, all they are asking for is the line in it which precedes the county and postcode, i.e. your Post Town (which may not be where you consider yourself to live!). This may well be just a town rather than a city, but no matter.

From our experience it’s not too critical what you enter. One customer even put the city where his card company was based, which was nowhere near where he lived – but the transaction still went smoothly. If you leave it blank, though, the payment is sure to fail.

Your acknowledgement of the order should include a link to download your purchases. On occasions this may go astray – into the spam folder or wherever. That’s not a problem.

When you make your first purchase you set up an account with us. This effectively creates your personal ‘locker’ on our website, opened not with a key but with the password you choose as you set it up.

There is a blue link to ‘My Account’ near the top right of every page in the Files Emporium. This will invite you to log in to access your personal locker – there’s a ‘forgot password’ option if need be.

Once you get in, go to the bit marked downloads. Every file you have ever purchased from us, both in the latest order and in the past, will be there for you. They stay there indefinitely, so if you mislay one of your files you can always retrieve a copy from there.

A gift voucher might be an idea for a present for someone you think would enjoy the browse, or as a thank you for a speaker at a meeting, for instance. They can be for any amount from a pound upwards, and since half our files cost a pound or less even one for £1 could be put to good use.

The voucher is sent as an e-mail. It will never expire. If the recipient places an order for more than its value, they just pay the extra. With an order that is less than the value of the voucher, the balance remains on it to be used again.

To read more about it go to the Files Emporium home page and select it as the fourth item down on the left hand side. There is a link in the very bottom line of what comes up for you to start your purchase. When you fill in your name and that of the recipient, this is exactly how they will appear in the e-mail message – so insert friendly versions of both instead of full and formal ones. When completed it appears as an item in your shopping cart, to be paid for by PayPal or Nochex in the usual way.

If you can access the internet, go to the GERS website then from Sales select the Sales List. You can download it from there. 

If not send a big SAE (with a large-letter stamp) to the Sales Officer at 14 Quantock Close, Bedford MK41 9EW – you will then receive a printed copy.

The Sales List occupies eight A4 pages, but even so in order to fit all the items in we have to give only brief details of each one in small print.

If you are able to go on-line, there are two ways to learn more.  One is to look up its equivalent in the Files Emporium: we have no constraint on space there, so you can read a far more detailed description accompanied by a picture or two.  The other is to visit the Sales List section, where you can download something called the expanded Sales List which provides more information.

Otherwise you are welcome to send a letter to the Sales Officer explaining what you wish to know.  An SAE for the reply would be appreciated.  Unfortunately the expanded Sales List itself is too big to print out and send – it currently has about 50 pages and is still growing!

Yes.  The Sales List includes indexes to every volume.  When you are ordering, be sure to specify that you want it for binding.  We will then send it in a suitable format, with pages unstapled.

Please be aware that we will use paper that is of a decent quality but not special (not acid-free, for instance).  If the paper itself is important to you, you would be better served by purchasing the Files Emporium copy (in Section NX, Indexes and Lists), which is specifically for binding, then print it out yourself.

Alternatively if you wished us to print the Sales List edition on special paper we would be happy to oblige, but with the order you would need to send us some of it in a board-backed A4 envelope.

 

There are two ways.  One is to visit the Sales List section of our website, where you will find a facility to place an order and pay for it on line.  The second is to send a letter to the Sales Officer at 14 Quantock Close, Bedford MK41 9EW, accompanied by a cheque made payable to GERS Publications.

Assuming you’ve remembered to sign it, the common reason is because you’ve made it payable to the Society.  Sales has a separate bank account, and unless you have made it payable to GERS Publications the bank nowadays won’t accept it.

We can arrange that.  Instead of placing a formal order, contact sales@gersociety.org.uk with a message listing the photos you would like and requesting a Nochex invoice for them.  This will come to you as an e-mail with a blue button to make the payment by card.

The photo JPGs are priced at 25p each, with a minimum order of £1.  The reason for this is PayPal charges – to take a payment of 25p would actually cost us more than that, so we would make a loss!

You can indeed buy a single photo, but it will cost you £1.  In terms of value for money it would make better sense to pick up to another three to accompany it.

You are welcome to do that for your own personal use, but results may vary.  The originals were quite small snapshots, usually less than postcard-sized, housed in a set of albums.  They differed in clarity and sharpness, of course. 

Each one was scanned at a resolution of 400 dpi.  Viewing on-screen should be fine, but we can’t promise that a large print-out will always prove acceptable.