The SRSV archives contains 15-20,000 paper documents relating to the history of signalling in Victoria and related matters. These documents are being scanned progressively and digital versions may be accessed by clicking the green button above. At present about 10% of the collection is available online. The search tool has been specifically designed to provide efficient and fast searching of our specialised documents using any modern web browser.
Detailed instructions may be found on the front page of the search tool. To return to those instructions from anywhere in the tool, click the Clear Search button, This will also reset your current search. Hover your mouse over a button, text box or title to get a brief explanation of the control’s function. Guidance to get you started is provided below.
First use the search filters to return a list of documents from the index. The list may include entries that have been obtained from various indexes of documents including those not currently in the archive. To only view scanned documents, check the “Online items only” box.
Refine the list by adjusting the filters and then clicking “Submit search”. All text boxes accept partial entries. Use the Geographic filters to select documents containing one or more locations. These are aware of the station sequence on each line, so will return all documents containing that location. For example, selecting “Mitcham Station” will return lithographs for Blackburn to Ringwood. To filter by a range of dates enter a partial date such as 195 to select documents from the 1950s or enter 1953/1958 for documents from 1953 to 1958. (Hover over the “Date search” title for more details.)
To ensure you have ALL relevant documents refine the filters to return 100 or fewer entries, as only the first 100 most recently added entries are returned,
Review the list for documents of interest. You can click on the column headings (e.g. Year) to sort by that column.
To see details of any document click the document record to display a pop up window.
To display a document click the link in the File Name (link) column of the list, or the box with the filename in the detail window. The document will open in a new Google Drive browser window. You do not require a Google account to access the documents, but the call-up time may be significantly shorter if you have one. The documents are watermarked with the filename for reference.
To zoom use your mouse scroll wheel or +/- keys or buttons .
To pan drag the image with your mouse.
To download or print use the onscreen buttons.
The quality of the original document is shown by the colour of the star (grey, yellow or green) in the search results list. You may need to wait a few seconds for your web browser to fully show the document detail.
Problems or suggestions?
The Search Tool has been fully tested on Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers and should work on any other modern web browser. Please ensure pop-ups are enable for this site. A prompt to enable pop-ups should appear if they are disabled.
The search tool will work on tablets and mobile phones, but, as touch operation has not been fully tested, for the best experience use a device with a keyboard.
Notification of any issues and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Please use the form below to contact the webmaster.