Powerful and easy to use Searching is at the heart of Rail-Online. It would be pointless having lists of photographs available if visitors to the site cannot find them the pictures they are looking for. We have taken considerable care in devising and developing what we strongly believe is the best search facility available on any railway-based photo site.

We start with the premise that whether you have only a general idea of what you are looking for, or that you know very precisely which photographs you are trying to find, or even if you are simply browsing, Rail-Online should guide you quickly and painlessly to the pictures you are looking for.

We provide three different ways of searching the database: by Classification (from any page), a Quick Search and an Advanced Search.

From the Image Search box use the three part drop-down classification system (in the correct order!):

        Company : GWR, LMS, LNER, SR, BR, Privatised, Other

After selecting company the next grouping is a sub-division to start narrowing down the selection

        Category : Steam, Diesel, Electric, DMU, EMU, Infrastructure

Finally choose the class by bringing up a list of the classes available within the first two selections or, if within infrastructure, the type of structure or view (eg station, shed, yard, signalbox)

         Class : Class name, Code or Type

The number of images matching the selection criteria is shown and if you are satisfied click the GO button to display the thumbnail images. Note that your selection criteria have been automatically added into the Advanced Search so you can use this to narrow down your search further.

Fill in the Quick Search box and click the GO button to search for a loco number, name or location.

Beware that the search is across the whole database and the results returned will include any instance of the characters typed in eg D80 would find both Warships and Class 20s with D80 in their number.

Click on Advanced Search for a more precise search which allows any combination of the 19 selection criteria stored against each image to be successively added in to narrow down your search.

The best way to explain is by an example:-

Suppose you are looking for photographs of an English Electric Class 40 Type 4. You may want shots in a particular livery or in a selected area or at a given date.

Select BR, Diesel, Class 40 using the Company, Category and Class dropdowns and hit the GO button. This will return thumbnails of all the available Class 40 photographs.

Return to the Advanced Search to narrow these down to those in green with full yellow ends using the Livery dropdown. To further refine the selection to only those with a D-prefix number whilst in this livery go back into Advanced Search and enter D in the Loco Number box, leaving the other boxes unchanged.

You can carry on narrowing down your search, perhaps to all those photographed in the North-West, by adding in another parameter: choose North-West from the Area dropdown. To select just those taken in or around Manchester, type Manchester into the Location box.

Still not satisfied, you may want to choose by date – use either the Period box to select by decade or to look across a longer or shorter period enter the first and last date into the two Date boxes.

In all cases each new criteria you have entered is added to those you have already filled in, thus narrowing the image returned with each additional filter you add in.

Where the search criteria boxes do not have dropdowns you can enter a full or part search criteria. For example if you are searching for a particular locomotive number or range enter in the Loco Number box D3% to display all of the images in the D300 to D399 range with D-prefix numbers if you are working within the Class 40s; if using this in general the search would pick up any number beginning with D3 such as Peaks or 08s.

Similarly you may be looking for all Class 40’s with Empress in the name; this time enter Empress in the Loco Name box.

The same applies to locations – you often only need to key in the first part of the location to find the images you want. Also note that you do NOT need to worry about Capital Letters – the searches are not case sensitive.