The Kearney Society Archive. Collection of items relating to Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney.

We are in the process of publishing all of our items in our archive.

We believe that items such as we have accumulated over a number of years,should be shared, so that everyone that is interested in railway history may use the items contained in this blog.

There are so many individuals that are for some reasons reluctant to share their collections.

Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney. Inventor of the Kearney High-Speed Railway

ELFRIC WELLS CHALMERS KEARNEY 

F.R.E.S. M.I.Struct. E. Consulting Engineer.

Born 3rd February 1881 Geelong Australia.

Died 15th April 1966 Surrey England.

Inventor of the Kearney High-Speed Railway 

Life can, at times, lead you in a direction that one would not expect.

As a collector of posters, which is my particular area of interest, I also look for anything different or unusual that may catch my attention. This happened three years ago. As part of my search, I found copies of two exhibition posters from the early 1930's, these were included in three box files of news cuttings relating to railways. The boxes were of no particular interest to me but I purchased all three boxes to get the posters. As sometimes can happen, when they arrived they did not include the posters!

On first inspection of the files, within the boxes it soon became apparent to me that these were the personal records of one man, Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney. Included were letters, diagrams, brochures and photographs etc. As may be the case of the majority of people, I had not heard of this man before, but the more I read the files the more the man interested me.

So began a journey around the world trying to increase my knowledge of the man and his determination to have his invention accepted, which took him his whole lifetime to endeavour to see it in use, but to no avail. It has now passed into history as one of the "what might have been's".

There have been, from time to time, publications on his schemes but these all appear to be of a parochial theme or just mention various locations.

After three years of research to try to fill in the gaps in the information, I now believe the time is right to bring back attention to Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney through his files, and supplement them with what I have accumulated.

I will, of course, credit each publication or institution including Elfric where information was obtained.