National Railway Museum

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

The National Railway Museum (NRM) is a museum in York, England, forming part of the Science Museum Group. The museum tells the story of rail transport in Britain and its impact on society. It is the home of the national collection of historically significant railway vehicles such as Mallard, a Stirling 'Single', Duchess of Hamilton and a Japanese bullet train. In addition, the National Railway Museum holds a diverse collection of other objects, from a household recipe book used in George Stephenson's house to film showing a "never-stop railway" developed for the British Empire Exhibition. It has won many awards, including the European Museum of the Year Award in 2001.

Starting in 2019, a major site development is underway. As part of the York Central redevelopment which diverts Leeman Road, the National Railway Museum is building a new entrance building to connect the two separate parts of the museum together. At the same time, the space around the museum is to be landscaped to provide public spaces.

In 2020, architectural practice Feilden Fowles won an international competition to create the museum's new £16.5 million Central Hall building—a key element of the museum's Vision 2025 masterplan. In January 2023, the museum's Station Hall (a Grade II listed "former goods station built between 1875–77") was closed until September 2025 for "urgent structural repair" which was to include the installation of a new roof over that area.

The Station Hall reopened in 2025 following an £11 million refurbishment, with a redesigned layout intended to better integrate historical narratives and enhance the visitor experience.

Overview

The National Railway Museum has over 6,000 objects on display of which around 100 are locomotives or rolling stock which tell the stories for Britain's railway innovation. The collection also includes fine jewellery worn by railway queens, models of planes, boats and hovercraft, and experimental technologies such as Louis Brennan's Gyroscopic Mono-rail car.

It is the largest museum of its type in Britain, attracting 656,205 visitors in 2025. The largest in the world in terms of floor area of exhibition buildings is the French Cité du Train in Mulhouse, although this attracts far fewer visitors than the National Railway Museum.

The National Railway Museum was established on its present site, the former York North locomotive depot, in 1975, when it took over the former British Railways collection located in Clapham and the York Railway Museum located off Queen Street, immediately to the southeast of the railway station; since then, the collection has continued to grow.

The museum is within walking distance of York railway station. A "roadtrain" runs from the city centre (near York Minster) to the museum on Leeman Road during summer months and school holidays. The York park and ride also serves the museum. Admission has been free since 2001. It is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm during February half-term holiday, then Wednesday to Sunday only from 10 am to 5 pm.

Locomotion – the National Railway Museum in Shildon, County Durham was opened in October 2004 and is operated by the NRM in conjunction with Durham County Council. It houses more of the National Collection in a new building and a historic site around the former workshop of Timothy Hackworth and in the most recent full year for which figures have been published (2011–2012), it attracted more than 210,000 visitors.

National Collection

There are approximately 280 rail vehicles in the National Collection, with around 100 being at York at any one time and the remainder divided between Locomotion at Shildon and other museums and heritage railways. The earliest are wagonway vehicles of about 1815. The permanent display includes "Palaces on Wheels", a collection of Royal Train saloons from Queen Victoria's early trains through to those used by Queen Elizabeth II up to the 1970s, among them some of the first rail vehicles to be set aside for preservation.

Other key exhibits normally to be seen at York include the 1846 Furness Railway No. 3 "Coppernob" locomotive, and the more modern express passenger steam locomotives London and North Eastern Railway Class A3 No. 4472 Flying Scotsman (added to the collection in 2004),

its streamlined sister Class A4 No. 4468 Mallard and London, Midland and Scottish Railway Princess Coronation Class No. 6229 Duchess of Hamilton. Flying Scotsman is among the exhibits intended for operation on the National Rail network from time to time.

The museum has imported several major vehicles for display: the Chinese Class KF7 4-8-4 locomotive donated in 1981 was built in Britain and the Wagons-Lits sleeping car donated in 1980 had been used on the Paris-London Night Ferry service. The single exception to the rule of exhibits associated with Britain is the Japanese 0 Series Shinkansen leading vehicle which was donated to the museum by the West Japan Railway Company in 2001 and which now forms part of an award-winning display, and is one of only two Shinkansen vehicles on exhibit outside Japan.

Rail vehicles on display are exchanged from time to time with other organisations, and examples of new-build stock from the current industry sometimes visit the museum for short periods.

Other physically large exhibits are the Stockton and Darlington Railway Gaunless Bridge and several stationary winding engines used on railway inclines.

The many other two and three-dimensional elements of the collection include signalling equipment, road vehicles, ship models, posters, drawings and other artwork,

tickets, nameplates, staff uniforms, clocks, watches, furniture and equipment from railway companies' hotels, refreshment rooms and offices (including company seals) and a wide range of models, some of which are operated on the museum's O scale model railway (originated in 1982).

Search Engine

The National Railway Museum holds a large open library and archive of railway related material. This includes an internationally significant collection of locomotive and rolling stock engineering drawings from railway works and independent manufacturing companies. Copies of many of these engineering drawings are sold to the heritage railway movement to assist with their new build locomotive and restoration projects. They are also sold to modellers who can use the drawing to produce accurate scale models. The library holds more than 20,000 books and 800 journals of which around 300 are active. The archive also holds a large collection of technical and test records, as well as timetables including a large number of Bradshaw timetables. The archives also hold some 1.75 million photographs covering the earliest era of photography to the modern day. These include official collections from railway companies and collections from enthusiasts like Eric Treacy and H. Gordon Tidey.

In 1999/2000 the Museum began to collect recordings of former railway staff for a National Archive of Railway Oral History. It also holds the archive of steam train recordings by Peter Handford. In 2009 The Forsythe Collection of travel and transport ephemera was acquired for the collection. Many of the museum's artworks and posters can also be viewed through Search Engine although these are now displayed in a series of temporary exhibitions in the museum's new art gallery which opened in 2011.

The Search Engine facility opened in late 2007 and is open from 10:00 to 17:30 Wednesday to Saturday. The archive and library collections can be viewed by anyone without an appointment although the website recommends pre-booking archive materials at least 24 hours in advance. The majority of its collections have been listed on its website for people to view what materials are available prior to their visit. For those people that cannot visit the museum itself there is a research service offered by the museum called Inreach.

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 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. Some were put on public display, usually at railway stations, displayed in a glass case or mounted 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 (1896) 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 purchased Shannon for preservation in 1946.

The LMS had its own collection of small objects at . 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 Railways 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 successor to the Glasgow Museum of Transport, the Riverside Museum, along with the previously mentioned locomotives) no longer form part of the National Collection.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “National Railway Museum” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.