NRS-16098 | Letter accepting Tender for Railway Construction of the Concord Contract

Full description

This record is the letter by which the Sydney Railway Company accepted the tender of Mr William Wallis for the construction of a section of railway line. This is a single original letter, now bound between rigid boards to create a booklet. The front board is stamped with the inscription: "Acceptance of First Contract for Railway Construction in Australia."
As an original outgoing letter, this record would probably once have had a counterpart amongst the copies of outgoing correspondence in NRS15281, but that series does not now include any surviving correspondence for the year 1851.


Custody History

From 1955 until 2000 the State Rail Authority of New South Wales maintained an ‘in house archives’ consisting of the archival records of the Authority, its predecessor agencies and the private railway companies taken over by the government. The date ranges of the records were from 1849 until 2000.

This particular record bears a bookplate recording its presentation to the New South Wales Railway Institute by J.H. Wallis Esquire (evidently a descendant of the original tenderer) in March, 1891, the stamp of the New South Wales Government Railways Information Bureau (undated), and the stamp of the State Rail Authority Archives dated 16th April, 1985.

When the decision was made to close the ‘State Rail Archives’ the parts of the collection that were required as State archives were transferred to the State Records Authority of NSW. Those record series were incorporated into the State Records series system of archives control and were re-numbered. This series may have been viewed in the State Rail Archives as series R296 and could have been previously cited as such in notes by researchers at State Rail Archives or in publications or unpublished works.