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| The Ultra-Sleek Duchess of Hamilton |
Britain’s National Railway Museum in York is a delight for two quite different museum-goers. First, there are the men–like Chuck–who grew up in a time when the staple and gold standard in toys for boys was model trains. Second, there are the steampunkers, but we’ll get to them in a bit.
The National Railway Museum is adjacent to York’s train station and occupies train yards used for various maintenance purposes on these massive machines that have inspired the male imagination for nearly two of centuries now. With two main halls, the museum is jam-packed with all sorts of trains and all things related to them.
There are early steam engines, diesel-electric engines, and all-electric engines. There are restored early passenger cars, cargo cars, and royal carriages (naturally English royals, including King George, Queen Victoria, and the current Queen, Elizabeth II). There’s equipment like massive winding wenches and the building’s original round table (a giant lazy Susan of sorts, large enough to spin a locomotive and balanced well enough that a man can push it around by hand). There are vintage rail posters, station signs, track signals, and engineering drawings.
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| One Of Many Steam Locomotives At The Museum |
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| Lori Marveling At A Massive Locomotive Built In Britain For China |
And then there’s a room called the “warehouse”: truly a warehouse jam-packed with shelves and racks fifteen feet tall, with everything and anything that might have once been used in conjunction with train travel and transportation. For nearly an entire wall of the warehouse, a case full of thousands of model train engines and cars is displayed.
For the love of all things steampunk (if you need a definition of “steampunk”, click here), you only have to realize that, at one point, people indeed thought the future of machinery was mechanical and the source of power was always going to be steam. Wandering around this museum, you can see just how far the original steampunkers managed to take the mechano-steam technology, to the ultra-sleek Duchess of Hamilton, a respectively fast (even today) and modern-looking (also even today) steam engine built in the 1940’s, and the Mallard, the fastest steam train engine ever built.
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| First Generation Japanese Shinkansen |
This museum alone would put York on the tour destination map, but as you’ll see in our next few blogs, there’s plenty more reason for Chuck and Lori to declare York their new favorite destination in England.
