National Railway Museum - Origins

Origins

Although there had been amateur attempts to establish a national railway museum from the late 19th century, the National Collection today results from the fusion of two long-running official initiatives. One was led by the State museums sector, evidencing pioneering technology, and the other by the railway industry, in which the key contribution came from the North Eastern Railway as successors to the historic Stockton and Darlington Railway.

What became the Science Museum (London) collection was begun in the 1860s by the Patent Office, whose museum included such early relics as Puffing Billy, Stephenson’s Rocket and Agenoria (sister locomotive to Stourbridge Lion), which was outhoused to York at an early date.

Preservation of redundant equipment by the railway companies themselves was a matter of chance. Sometimes relics were stored in company workshops and offices and some were destroyed as circumstances changed. Where put on public display at all the equipment was usually mounted on railway stations in a case or on a plinth. Coppernob at Barrow-in-Furness, Derwent and Locomotion at Darlington and Tiny at Newton Abbot were long-lived examples of this form of display.

The first railway museums were opened at Hamar in Norway (1897) and Nuremberg in Germany (1899). These inspired talk of doing the same in Britain, both in the 1890s and again in 1908, but this came to nothing at that time. Indeed, two of the Great Western Railway’s earliest broad-gauge locomotives, North Star and Lord of the Isles, which had been set aside at Swindon Works, were cut up in 1906 for lack of space and several other relics were similarly lost in subsequent years.

From 1880, J. B. Harper of the North Eastern had been collecting material much of which was exhibited on the occasion of the S.& D.R. centenary in 1925; and which then formed the basis of a museum opened at York by the London and North Eastern Railway in 1928 under the curatorship of E. M. Bywell.

The smaller exhibits were housed in the old station buildings and the rolling stock and other large exhibits in the former locomotive erecting and repair shops of the old York and North Midland Railway (demolished after the museum closed). Despite this however, the locomotives were displayed on short lengths of track acting as plinths, very much in traditional museum style. It was only when the NRM was formed that Britain acquired a rail-served railway museum where large exhibits could come and go with ease.

The collection was dominated by items from the North Eastern Railway, together with Great Northern Railway items. The other three ‘Big Four’ railway companies showed little interest in contributing to the LNER’s initiative, though eventually one locomotive representative of each did find its way there: the Great Western's City of Truro, London and North Western Railway Columbine and London, Brighton and South Coast Railway B1 Class Gladstone.

The GWR assembled a valuable collection of small objects, mounted privately in a long corridor at Paddington station, and in 1925 it built a replica of North Star. It preserved City of Truro and Tiny in 1931 and Shannon in 1946.

The LMS had its own collection of small objects at Euston. It also began to build up a collection of historic locomotives, which included Caledonian 123, Columbine, Cornwall, Hardwicke, Highland 103, Midland 118 and Pet. Three others, set aside for preservation at Crewe Works, were scrapped in a change of policy in 1932. The LMS set aside one further locomotive (Midland 158A) before it was overtaken by nationalisation. It also succeeded in preserving a collection of historic royal saloons at Wolverton and built a replica Rocket, with six replica carriages, for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway centenary in 1930, and a replica Grand Junction Railway Travelling Post Office.

The Southern Railway inherited three preserved carriages of the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway, long displayed at York and at Waterloo Station, but otherwise had no policy of preserving redundant equipment. Ryde was preserved from 1934 until cut up in 1940; the only other locomotive preserved by the Southern was Boxhill in 1947. (Gladstone was preserved by the Stephenson Locomotive Society as a private initiative and much later (in 1959) donated to the British Transport Commission.)

The nationalisation of British transport in 1948 gave the opportunity for a more consolidated approach and a report was produced by the British Transport Commission in 1951. Amongst other things this recommended a curator be appointed for the Commission’s holdings (John M. Scholes), retention of the York museum, creation of other regional museums (not carried out in the way proposed), a small relics display in the old Great Hall at Euston railway station (done on a temporary basis) and a large museum of collections elsewhere in London. For the latter, the former station at Nine Elms was originally favoured as a site, but what was eventually opened in 1961 was the Museum of British Transport in a former bus garage in Clapham. An official list of locomotives for preservation was compiled, and many were stored in sheds and works throughout the country, others being placed on loan to local authority museums. The 'Steam' Museum at Swindon still displays a large number of items from the National Collection, while the Glasgow Museum of Transport was also indebted to it, although many of the Scottish relics (including NBR K 'Glen' Class 4-4-0 No. 256 Glen Douglas currently at the Bo'ness & Kinneil Railway) no longer form part of the National Collection.

The Beeching Report recommended that British Rail should stop running museums, and a campaign was led by transport historian L. T. C. Rolt and others such as the historian Jack Simmons to create a new museum. Agreement was reached under terms in the Transport Act 1968 for B.R. to provide premises to be occupied by a National Railway Museum which would be a branch of the National Museum of Science and Industry then under Dame Margaret Weston and the first English national museum outside London.

The building provided was the former locomotive roundhouse at York North (rebuilt in the 1950s), alongside the East Coast Main Line. The old museum and that at Clapham were closed in 1973. A Sainsbury's supermarket now stands on the Clapham site. Some items were retained in the capital and formed the basis of the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Some from York were re-located to the Darlington Railway Centre and Museum. Exhibits from the previous museums at York and Clapham moved to the new site were supplemented by vehicles taken from storage at Preston Park in Brighton and elsewhere and restored. Creation of the York museum was largely in the hands of its first keeper, Dr John Coiley, his deputy Peter Semmens, John van Riemsdijk of the Science Museum and David Jenkinson.