In my never ending quest to keep my dynamic business at the cutting edge of technology, (actually I was finding it hard to remember where I had put things) I recently hired a top quality consultant to create an easy to use search facility for the stock in the Titfield Thunderbolt bookshop. After tireless effort and any number of business lunches in the smoke filled bar (remember those?) of the “Inn at Titfield” he has finally come up with the goods.

Using the new search page is very simple and does not require the use of any Boolean operators (that’s what Venn Diagrams were for), logical expressions (thank goodness for that), or even parentheses, (you can use it without members of the previous generation being present).

What the page searches is the text of books' titles or authors’ names and all you need to put in are key words that best identify or describe the book, subject or author that interests you. The more unique a word is, the less “hits” it will produce and the more common a word is then the more “hits” it will produce. To give an example if looking for “The Lincolnshire Potato Railways” then the best single word might actually be “Potato”. You might think that this is a common word and you would be right, a “Google" search on potato would yield an astronomic number of returns, but the point here is that “Potato” is not a common word in terms of titles of railway books and would give you your one desired result. “Lincolnshire” wouldn’t be bad, there have been one or two other books with that in the title, but “Railways” would be hopeless, as it is a very common word in the above context. “The” wouldn’t work, as words of less than four letters are ignored.

That said, the consultant was perspicacious enough to make an exception to this rule for certain “words” such as GWR, LMS, Ivo – those small collections of letters that can mean so much to us.

One other point, it is best to search in the singular - by which I mean not using plurals of words. For example, if you search under “wagon” it will find titles containing the words “wagon” and “wagons”, whereas searching under “wagons” will miss titles containing the word “wagon”.

I have used a lot of search engines in my time, not least in my work as a librarian, and I can honestly say that this simple search engine is actually quite effective. It does not try to be too clever, it knows its limitations, it won’t baffle you with a multiplicity of meaningless choices or fail through lack of software updates or clever “improvements”.

Anyway, give it a try, if you can’t find what you want then feel free to e-mail me as there are books in stock that haven’t made it into the database. Equally please contact me if anything does go wrong and I will return to the public bar and my consultant for further deliberations.