He was Vice-President of the Newcomen Society, which established a
Rolt Prize;a trustee and member of the Advisory Council of the Science Museum; member of the York Railway Museum Committee; an honorary MA of Newcastle; an honorary MSc of Bath and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was a joint founder of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, which has an annual Rolt lecture. He helped to form the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.
A locomotive 'Tom Rolt' on the Talyllyn Railway, the world's first preserved railway, was named in his memory in 1991. His book
Railway Adventure recalls this period.
Rolt observed the changes in society due to the industrial-scientific revolution. In the epilogue to his biography of I.K.Brunel he writes two years before C. P. Snow makes similar statements about the split between the arts and sciences:
Men spoke in one breath of the arts and sciences and to the man of intelligence and culture it seemed essential that he should keep himself abreast of developments in both spheres. ... So long as the artist or the man of culture had been able to advance shoulder to shoulder with engineer and scientist and with them see the picture whole, he could share their sense of mastery and confidence and believe wholeheartedly in material progress. But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished and doubts and fears came crowding in.
He set out these ideas more fully in his book
High Horse Riderless, a classic of green philosophy.
A bridge (no. 164) on the Oxford Canal in Banbury bears his name (in commemoration of his book
Narrow Boat), as does a centre at the boat museum at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. A blue plaque to Rolt was unveiled in at Tooley's Boatyard, Banbury on 7 August 2010 as part of the centenary celebrations of his birth.