I am Rach Cottle a PhD candidate at La Trobe University researching the history of women on the Victorian Railways.
My research was inspired by the work of my grandmother who was a gatekeeper for the Victorian Railways in the 1940s.
The name of the site ‘Second Class Pass’ was inspired by the Victorian Railways employee travel passes in our family archive which once belonged to my grandmother.
‘Ours was a second-class pass, but we travelled like aristocrats because everyone knew we were railway people.’
(Patsy Adam-Smith (1964) 1982, p 22).
