A unique combination of railway history greets visitors at the entrance to the Ron Fitch pavilion.

The plaque commemorating the opening of the museum in December 1988 is mounted on bluestone used in the construction of the original Port Adelaide station platform. The wheels are from one of the original steam locomotives built in 1856 in England to operate the railway line between Adelaide and Port Adelaide, and rest on rails from the original track.

Locomotive Number Plates were used to identify individual engines. In some cases, certain locomotives were named after dignitaries prominent at the time of the locomotive's introduction to service.

An extensive collection of number and name plates adorns the Northern wall of the Ron Fitch pavilion. Also on display are a number of station signs.

Located along the Western side of the main pavilion are a number of display cabinets housing rare and interesting railway memorabilia and artifacts such as cutlery from the TransAustralian passenger train, railway uniforms, and commemorative clips and spikes.

Many advertisers used metal signs at stations and alongside the track to advertise products.

The museum has a collection of these signs on display around the site.

On the Break of Gauge platform within the main rollingstock pavilion you will find a working set of old time scales that were found in many shopping centres and railway stations.

Why not put in a coin and see what your weight is!

The printing press on display was used from the 1920s for printing tickets for the South Australian Railways and the State Transport Authority. It prints Edmondson tickets - small 2 1/4" x 1 3/16" (57mm x 30mm) coloured cards which until recent times, were in almost universal use by rail systems throughout the world.

Thomas Edmondson was born in Lancaster, in the UK on 30th June 1792. As a boy he began his apprenticeship with a local woodworker, but completed it with a furniture maker and became a journeyman cabinetmaker. He went into a partnership with some friends, but the business failed and he was forced to look for employment elsewhere. For a while he became involved in the tea and grocery business, but was never happy in this field.

In 1836, at the age of 44, he applied for and was successful in obtaining a position as Stationmaster at Scotsby on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, but later he moved to Milton where he formed the idea of a new type of passenger ticket.

While at Milton, Thomas Edmondson built a small printing frame in which he produced card tickets measuring 1 1/2" x 1 1/8" (39mm x 29mm) showing the issuing station and destination, the number (still written) and the value. His tickets were numbered from 0 to 9999, so that the number of the next ticket to be sold represented the number of tickets sold to that point. This system survived until Edmondson tickets were phased out in favour of electronic and other types 150 years later.

The printing press still operates and is used by the museum to print tickets for special events.

This rectangular cart was built in the 1880s for transport of coffins. It was hauled by hand, but has a design similar to a horse-drawn vehicle of the period. It continued to be used at the Adelaide Station until withdrawn in 1982.

Manually operated clock hands were used at South Australian Railways Metropolitan stations to advise passengers of train departure times. The hands were turned with a special pole inserted in a slot connected by gears.