It is common these days to describe the periods in which railways existed in Eras and some retailers allow their stock to be searched by era.

The table below describes the eras and the right hand column contains links to Knowledge Base pages organised by era.

In reality the boundaries between eras are not sharply defined and most railway artefacts span several eras so it is difficult to assign a single era to some pages. Generally, where a specific livery is described it is tagged with that livery’s era. In other cases the artefacts era of origin is used.