• George Gibbins joined the Army Medical Corps and was posted to Palestine in the 1921 but went missing and was presumed dead but was OK and came home to retrain as an ‘electric track lineman’

• Agatha Christie used trains a lot in her writing - in ‘The ABC Murders’ each victim has an ABC Railway Timetable left by the body; in ‘4.50 From Paddington’ a train passenger witnesses a murder in a slowly passing train; and in urder on the Orient Express’ a murder occurs on a glamorous, snowbound train

• Helena Wojtczak, British Rail’s first female guard at 19 - those in recruitment hoping a medical exam and tough training courses would weed her out as an inadequate candidate but she passed them all.

• The assassination attempt on Queen Victoria at Windsor Station in 1882 was by a man who’d been sectioned by his own family for homicidal tendencies but had been released form the asylum. He was found not guilty on grounds of insanity. Her Majesty wrote ‘It is worth being shot at, to see how much one is loved.’

• Brunel’s father was a Frenchman who’d fled the Revolution for the USA and had become NewYork City’s Chief Engineer. Back in England his son Isambard helped him on building a tunnel under the Thames. Isambard was injured and spent his recuperation time on designs for the Clifton Suspension Bridge

• electrical engineer Caroline Haslett, at a Suffragette dinner found herself sitting next to Emmeline Pankhurst, who upon hearing that Caroline hoped to become a fully qualified engineer, said “But surely that’s a very unsuitable occupation for a lady, isn’t it?” Caroline put Mrs Pankhurst in her place, telling her that doing a job in the right way was more important than whether it was done by a man or a woman

• Ernest Wills was the branch manager of WH Smith’s bookstall at Edenbridge Station in 1930s.The very first Smiths opened in Euston in 1848, and were the first to use the railway to quickly distribute London- based daily newspapers nationwide

• Col. Holman Stephens - light railway civil engineer - was 6’2” by the age of 15 and remained a bachelor all his life.When he died in 1931 his estate, worth about £1.4m in today’s money, was divided between four colleagues at Tonbridge station

• John Pelham Maitland - in charge of sheds at Bognor - was the son of a whisky distiller, who organised staff outings to Europe, spoke 7 languages fluently

• Trevor Tupper, of the Rail Users’ Assoc. - in 1967 he may have set a record for the most rail miles covered in two weeks when he travelled 11,483 miles by train in 280 hours! And set up privately run rail excursions to Torquay and Scotland for example, with proceeds going to charity

• Suffragette Charlotte Marsh, who’d been imprisoned for throwing roof tiles onto the car of the Prime Minister Anthony Asquith, was employed by the next Prime Minister as chauffeur and mechanic!

• Times newspaper columnist Dame Flora Shaw, in the 1890s was the highest paid female journalist. On a train in Australia, she said her dress caught fire in the blistering heat and was only put out by her male companion grabbing the outer layer of her dress in his hands to extinguish it

• The Railway servants Orphanage in Woking, was built on land purchased from the London Necropolis Company, who had their own special funeral train services from Waterloo.

If you’re unfamiliar with Danny’s plaques: where English Heritage’s ceramic blue plaques, as you know, celebrate famous, creative or otherwise successful people. Danny has been creating blue plaques for real, ordinary people like you and me - particularly for people that lived over 100, 150 years ago. What might’ve seemed like ordinary jobs at the time, can remind us today of how life, fashion and technology was often so much different then. Jobs such as ostrich feather curler (for those Victorian hats!) or ivory carvers, tallow melters, even cinema usherettes are jobs of the past.

For Railway 200 the plaque design has a vintage, railway feel, sharing the typeface on mid-century railway signs, posters and leaflets; and the fishtail shape of the enamel cap badge worn by uniformed railway staff in the 1950s and 60s, that displayed each employee’s role to the public.