The North Eastern Railway Museum, York – ‘the germ of a truly National Railway Museum’

Abstract

It is remarkable that the history of Britain’s first railway museum is so poorly documented in historical museological and specialist railway-heritage publications. This is despite the facts that the origins of the National Railway Museum (NRM) can be traced in the North Eastern Railway (NER) Museum at York and that the latter’s national (and an international) reputation made it Britain’s de facto national railway museum from the 1930s until the 1960s. Jack Simmons, in his introduction to the NRM book Dandy-Cart to Diesel, gives a brief overview of the museum’s predecessor institutions, but little else has been written on the subject.2 This chapter draws on the previously unstudied records held by the NRM – principally the minutes of the various committees successively responsible for the museum – and partial files from the British Transport Commission’s museums. Various NER and London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) papers held at the Public Record Office, Kew, have also been examined.