HELENA WOJTCZAK (pronounced 'VOYT-CHAK') was born in Sussex and grew up in London. At the age of 19 she became the first woman employed as a guard by British Rail. In connection with this, Helena has written The Recruitment and Training of the First Female Guard on British Rail . Working in the industry led her to research and, later, to write the history of Railwaywomen. Now Britain's foremost authority on the history of women railway workers, she has been consultant historian to the National Railway Museum and a contributor to The Oxford Companion to British Railway History. Helena has a BSc Honours degree in the Social Sciences (majoring in Psychology) and Social History. She has recently written three books on women's history including the hugely successful Women of Victorian Sussex, sales of which exceeded all expectations, and has created a website called Women of Hastings and St Leonards - a social history containing many details about life for women in a typical English south coast town in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Helena lectures in local history all across Sussex, and has lately been invited by Sussex University to tutor in Women's History. She has written for the Oxford University Press, the Hastings Press, Hunter House Publishing, the Hastings & St Leonards Observer, The Warrior Magazine, P3 Publishing (Steam Railways), The Victorian Web and Encyclopaedia Titanica.