The Eastern Counties Railway (the fore-runner of the Great Eastern Railway) was incorporated in July 1836. Its original workshops were at Romford but in 1847 these were moved to Stratford in East London. Stratford Works Drawing Office became the centre for engineering drawings for the Great Eastern Railway (formed in 1862) and its successors until it closed in 1963. The complex of workshops that gradually grew up at Stratford comprised locomotive, carriage and wagon works as well as associated specialist workshops.

Around 1900 Arthur Chown became manager of the Drawing Office and carried out a major reorganisation of the office and its recording procedures. He designed a card index system based on a system he found described in the Patents’ Office. The cards were in various sequences, one numerical and others to permit searching by categories. There were some 150,000 cards, most of which have survived. As part of the process of re-organisation the drawings were culled again, so that little survives from before 1875 other than a selection then deemed to be of historical interest.

After Grouping in 1923 Stratford Works became part of the London & North Eastern Railway and reverted mainly to maintenance and repair, other than a short period of work on upgrading some locomotives. The final works were connected with the northeast London electrification. Following nationalisation of the railways, workshop capacity was rationalised. In 1963 Stratford Works was closed and much of the work was transferred to Doncaster. At the time Stratford Works employed 2032 staff in the locomotive repair works and 1498 in the carriage and wagon works.