Hi from social distancing/semi-isolation and working from home! Blogging continues as normal even though I can’t travel so today’s blog is from my trip to York in December – which is what I’ve been writing about throughout March anyway. My primary objectives in York were Jorvik and the Minster. With them crossed off, I set forth for my third target, the National Railway Museum.
I’m not a trainspotter or a steam nerd but I enjoyed the Danish railway museum in Odense and everyone likes a steam train. Not many steam trains here but plenty of steam locomotives (shut up, some things just get hammered into you throughout your whole life and my dad is a train person. Post-war buses first and foremost though).
It’s free to go in, which is nice, although they also ask so politely if you’ll give them a donation that it feels unreasonable not to. And you know what? It beats Jorvik! For a start, it’s much bigger and you can wander at will. For another, if you go out the back of Station Hall out n the South Yard, there’s a steam train ride! Now, it only goes about two hundred metres up the yard and back. It’s not the most exciting steam train ride in the world but if you’re after a hint of soot in your eyes, this is the place to come. I was talking to the guard while we waited for the single-carriage train to get in from its little ride and although we’re in York, the other end of the country from my homeland, he has relatives in Dorchester and informed me that the Flying Scotsman had been on the Swanage Light Railway earlier in the year. I didn’t correct him on the “lightness” of the railway in question (how light does he think it is if a 96 tonne – plus carriages plus passengers – steam locomotive is chugging along it?) but I told him I’d been there and explained the situation with joining the heritage railway to the South Western Main Line at Wareham (in short, rail politics rather than natural gas – his odd supposition).
I’d enjoyed Station Hall. It’s set up like an olde-timey station platform with steam trains on four sets of tracks, more down the sides, Union Jacks up like it’s 1942, strings of fairy lights like it’s Christmas 2019, antique signs and ticket machines and a cafe all along one of the platforms. Very atmospheric. I want to write a novel featuring an international steam train journey now.
Then I went under the road and into the Great Hall. Well. This is different. First thing you see, the drive unit of an original Eurostar coming straight at you. The Great Hall is… well, great! This is where they keep stuff and it’s all either just put somewhere or arranged in a big circle around a turntable. From the number of different locos I’ve seen in pictures on the turntable, I guess they move everything around semi-regularly.
There’s steam locos in here too, including one with its boiler cut open to show you its insides and one with a pit underneath so you can examine its oily underside. But there’s also the only Japanese bullet train outside Japan – and you can go inside and pretend to be travelling on it. There’s Mallard and a replica of Rocket and as much railway stock as you can fit in a warehouse.
And then if that isn’t enough, the North Shed tells the story of the Flying Scotsman, which was in fact the name of the Edinburgh to London service before the famous loco took it. The loco itself is pretty permanently on tour – the day I was there, it was in Manchester and Carlisle. Even more thrillingly, the North Shed houses the museum’s random object collection. One for the true enthusiasts. Model trains, tea sets, station signs, unidentified chairs, bits of machinery, all stacked on warehouse racking. Back to the Great Hall.
Bear cubs, I took a lot of selfies in there. I like trains. They’re romantic. I don’t know if I’ve published the Paris posts yet – I’m still figuring out exactly how everything from the last quarter of 2019 is going to go into my 2020 blog schedule – but the musings on the romance of rail is in my Eurostar post. I have a new camera since Paris – that story is in the Sainte-Chapelle post and all the thing about Paris posts applies again – and it has a flip-up selfie screen. I feel like a proper Instagrammer.
Yeah, run into Jorvik but when you’re done there, pop along to the Railway Museum for a couple of hours. Much more fun.