National Railway Museum

York is home to the largest railway museum in the world complete with "an unrivaled collection of locomotives, rolling stock, railway equipment, documents and records." To top it off, it's the only free museum in the city. Pat and I spent the afternoon yesterday strolling among numerous train engines, passenger cars, and train paraphernalia. They even have a couple of cars built for the Royalty to travel around in which were quite interesting. A true train nut could probably spend days in there. As a train novice, I was there for pretty pictures and an info scan.




(Working wheel demo)



What I can tell you is:
• Really old passenger trains look like someone took the body of three stage coaches, smashed them together, and set them on rails. That was only for the fancy people, third class passengers had unprotected outdoor seating in what looks like a wagon bed on rails.

(Notice the platform on the back for a guard to sit and the rails across the top for the luggage–just like a stage coach)

• Before steam engines, horses pulled the cars uphill and across flat areas. For the downhill, they got to jump in their own little car, complete with water bucket, to rest. Some smart guy realized this improved their efficiency.

• The inside of a train engine is like a huge complex radiator whose sole purpose is to drive the pistons turning the wheels. (A train nut somewhere is groaning at my over-simplified understatement)

(Full-size train cut apart to show how it works)

• Train engines were made from some materials I wouldn't have expected. Some looked like they were made of copper and some had what looked like beadboard cladding–they're quite beautiful when they're all gussied up and sitting in a museum :)


• Toilets did (and some still do) just empty on the tracks so you're not suppose to use them while sitting at a station. Didn't know that and eww... This is changing on some of the more modern trains as they adapt airline toilets for rail use. It will still make me wonder the next time I use one...

• They had signs from 1909 inside some of the engineer cabs saying "Caution: Do not look over or pass along the side of this cab when near bridges, tunnels, loadgauges, or coal stages." I wonder why not.

• Not only is Swindon a town in England, but it's important to the railroad industry.


• The Royal cars are very fancy and are like apartments on wheels. The Queen Mother's car was very simple and austere. Partly because she wanted to travel incognito and not be bombed by Nazi's and partly because of the country's economic situation in the War. Her train came complete with armored window shutters and pulled into train tunnels for protection at night.

What I can't tell you is why...


I think our only disappointment was that you couldn't walk into many things at all. In a lot of places they had raised platforms so you could peak into the windows–looky, no touchy :)

For more information, click the link to go to their site