Trains, Trains, Trains!!!

York hosts the National Railway Museum for the whole of England, and it's free entry for everyone.

"Why haven't we been?" we asked ourselves on a recent Sunday morning. We decided right then and there that we had to remedy the situation, walked the 10 minutes to the train station, and were on our way to the museum less than 30 minutes after posing the question to ourselves.

Inside the great hall

Turns out the museum is so large (largest locomotive museum in the world, actually), we only saw a portion of it the afternoon we visited. We spent almost the entire visit in the Great Hall, the largest and most historic part of the museum. 

Myriad of train name plates

Train plaque with 4 font types

York is and always was the great train hub of Northern England, and the Great Hall was one of nine locomotive sheds in York, servicing thousands of trains every year. Hundreds of men (and women, during wartime) worked in this dirty, sooty, muddy shed that is now a bright, airy museum. During WWII the shed was badly damaged by a German air raid, but the shed quickly rebounded; the trains must keep running! 

Steam train workings

What is now the Great Hall was de-commissioned in 1967 as a service station when steam trains were no longer the norm, and it became a storage site for old steam trains. 

A 1920s replica of an 1830s Liverpool/Manchester train

Historic train

The National Railway Museum opened in the mid 1970s and the shed was re-named the Great Hall, and the rest is history!

Another beautiful steam train

There were so many cool trains to see! Some seriously old timey and some famous, like the Mallard, world record holder for the fastest steam train. There were also some historic trains, like the train that carried Winston Churchill's coffin as it rode across the country so its citizens far and wide could pay their respects. We even got to sit on an original, series 0 Shinkansen, AKA Japanese bullet train! 

Winston Churchill's funeral train

At one point while we were visiting, the staff rotated a train for visitors to see how trains were moved around inside the hall. Although the hall is quite large, moving giant locomotives can be quite tricky! The train rotator has been used for years, historically to move train engines in and out for servicing, and nowadays to move trains in and out of the exhibit hall. 

Crowds awaiting the train rotation demo

Rotating the train

There were so many neat trains, and a lot of them had a great story. As usual, I have purchased the guidebook and will be looking it over so that when we go back to the museum we don't miss any of the other cool stuff!  

Colorful engines 

And the whole afternoon I couldn't help thinking, if Sheldon Cooper was a real person, he would be in hog heaven in this museum!