HELENA WOJTCZAK(pronounced 'VOYT-CHAK') was born by the sea in Sussex, but spent her childhood, teens and twenties in London. After moving first to the Kent coast and later to St Leonards on Sea , she studied and gained a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology & Social Sciences in 1994. She became fascinated by oral and social history and Victorian social investigation. Postgraduate courses in those subjects led to the award of Honours in 1997. She has also studied the British women's suffrage movement, nineteenth century feminism and the Victorian working classes. Over the last few years, Helena has carried out considerable research on the women who lived in Hastings and Sussex in the mid-19th century and has also looked into the local suffrage movement during the Edwardian period. This research is available free at "Women of Hastings and St Leonards - a social history". Helena also gives a number of public talks and seminars in her local area. Among her printed works are three books on women's history including Women of Victorian Sussex She also has written for the Oxford University Press, Hunter House Publishing, the Hastings & St Leonards Observer, The Railway Ancestors Family History Society, The Warrior Magazine, The Victorian Web and Encyclopaedia Titanica. Helena Wojtczak is also Britain's foremost authority on the history of women railway workers , she has been consultant historian to the National Railway Museum and an expert contributor to The Oxford Companion to British Railway History.