Scale Drawings

[Claire RJ]

Recently I was having a look to see what links would come up if I googled CRS Drawing search, and was interested to see that one referred back to RM Web. As the founder and manager of CRS Drawing search, I thought that perhaps an explanation as to what we are about on RM Web might be of interest. CRS Drawing Search started as a result of my elder son (by now grown up) begging me not to throw out all of his model railway magazines. So we decided to go the other way and collect a complete set and started to collect a complete series of various Model Railway Magazines and advertising the duplicates that we had acquired on our website as a result of buying magazines to make a complete set. As a result I received several enquiries such as "Do you know where I could find such and such?." Initially I did start trying to help the various enquirers but it was sometimes taking much too long to get an answer. Most Of the enquiries were to do with "where can a find a drawing for this or that?" As a result I started to index all the magazines that I had in our master set, a task which over the years has taken many hours  and still is not finished. So as this is very much a time consuming labour of love, drawings tend to be added in batches, as the magazines become available to me. The crsdrawingsearch website has had to move web host twice, which in itself means that  time had to be spent rebuilding the whole website twice. 

 

​Sources of drawings are often (but not exclusively ) drawn from magazines. Drawings fall into two categories now on the website,  (1) drawings that are known to exist but where we cannot provide them but can advise as to the whereabouts of the publications and (2) drawings that we can actually provide.

​Standards of published drawings vary considerably from a basic sketch to a complete dimensioned set of drawings but we try to advise on this.  For all of this we do make a charge to offset the many hours that have been spent in cataloguing the drawings, and building the website. I should add that this still remains a labour of love and also that months sometimes go by without receiving any enquiries. In the meantime I continue to trawl through the sources and add further batches of drawings from time to time. As a Chartered Surveyor, drawings are of considerable interest to me and I not only run crsdrawing search but am also in the process of surveying  and drawing  the coaches for the West Somerset Railway Heritage coaches project, another task that I am nowhere near completing.