You need to look at the MoSI (Museum of Science and Industry) website,
http://emu.msim.org.uk/htmlmn/collections/online/search.php
Be warned, the search engine uses order date and number, not delivery date and works number - a search on 1879 won't turn anything up, but 1878 in the "Beyer, Peacock" collection, looking for drawing as the key word, and you will be rather lucky.
Since I'm actually a historian in the day job, I spend rather a lot of time in archives so have a point of view on this. As Simon has shown, the information can be found without
too much difficulty although it is a bit of a fiddle - I've just had a play with the search for something else, just to see what appeared. Not nearly as straightforward as, say, The National Archives.
I agree that this is not the easiest search facility to use - and, if the data as displayed is anything to go by, it's partly because this collection is decidedly undercatalogued (not the museum's fault, necessarily, I've no idea what state the Beyer, Peacock collection was in when in arrived, how it was recorded or whether it was catalogued at all) but it's very, very difficult to get funding to do this sort of thing, particularly at the moment*) - but developing the catalogue search facility to include all these additional fields which probably don't currently exist at an item level in the MoSI catalogue, and to do the work mapping drawings, and their subsiduary details, such as delivery date and/or works no., etc. (which obviously won't apply to the vast majority of items in the collection of the MoSI) would entail huge amounts of work, time and money.
Realistically, this means a two or three year project and a large six or possibly seven figure sum (since if you're going to that trouble you would want to do, say, all the engineering drawing collections regardless of origin) and that assumes that you know exactly what you want before you start and the funders will wear it/can afford it. Should you have such a sum knocking around and can find some archive professionals at a loose end to do it then I know that the curators would be delighted.
A big plus, however: getting preview images of the drawings must have required a significant outlay in itself and, that's an archiving priority question; this is where they've chosen to spend the money as a relatively quick win. Since that would count as a digitisation project, and that's the current vogue, it is possible to get funds for this
relatively easily. The result of this is that, unlike many other archives, if you can find the right drawing in the catalogue, at least you should have a decent idea of a. the state of the drawing and b. whether it actually shows what you want in the first place.
Adam
*It's even harder to get volunteers to do this sort of thing to a suitable standard and that creates another set of challenges and this isn't cost-free either.
