Steam--The Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon

Steam--The Museum of the Great Western Railway opened in June 2001 in Swindon, United Kingdom. This eleven-million-pound, 70,000-square-foot project is the centerpiece of Swindon's celebrations of the millennium and of the Borough of Swindon's centenary. The museum is located in one of the buildings of the Great Western Railway's former engineering headquarters, the Swindon Works. It is a welcome attempt to tell the stories of the men and women who worked on and used the Great Western. Quite clearly, the themes running through the museum's displays have been carefully selected to appeal to nonspecialist audiences, and suitable objects have been chosen to illustrate them.

The museum's reception area integrates original industrial features into a welcoming, visitor-friendly environment. The warmth of the welcome is seamlessly reflected in everything from design and signage to the staff's obvious commitment to customer service. The initial impression is that visitors come first (fig. 1).

There is some debate among exhibit designers about whether museums should encourage visitors to follow a set route or leave them to their own devices to explore as the mood takes them. The designers of the Museum of the Great Western Railway have chosen the first option. A visit to the museum begins with an audiovisual orientation. Archive film is shown on a series of very large screens, with an extra layer of texture added by brief reminiscences from railway workers. The effect is both evocative and provocative, although some visitors found the combined effect confusing due to the poor acoustics of the space. No doubt the exhibit designers will revisit this.

The museum contains a large number of interactive exhibits, both mechanical and computer driven. For example, one exhibit (unfortunately out of order at the time of my visit), in the machine shop area of the museum, allows visitors to investigate how gears work; another encourages visitors to assemble the component parts of a locomotive in the correct order. Unfortunately, the interactive exhibits are not uniformly successful. One group of visitors attempting to use a computer interactive dealing with the theme of goods traffic walked away after a short time, quite unable to fathom what the exhibit was about or what they were supposed to do. The museum's commitment to interactivity is welcome, but exhibits that are out of order or incomprehensible create a worse visitor experience than if they were not there at all.

The locomotive footplate demonstrator produced a similar reaction. A voice gives instructions about the controls and how to set the locomotive in motion, but it very quickly becomes clear that using the controls makes no difference to the operation of the exhibit. While this was disappointing to some, other visitors thoroughly enjoyed the exhibit, especially the shifting cab floor, which they felt was very realistic. It turned out that they had never ridden on a locomotive. It is fair to say that the convincing steam locomotive driving simulator remains to be developed. Uncharacteristically, at the time of my visit the museum was totally devoid of children, either in school groups or on private visits, so it was impossible to gauge their reaction to any of the exhibits.

Most objects in the displays are fully contextualized, but the 4-6-0 locomotive Caerphilly Castle is displayed as an icon. The locomotive is the only object in a very large space. Having visited exhibits dealing with life in Swindon Works, visitors are encouraged to look upon the locomotive as Swindon's "finished product." Facts and figures about the locomotive--mileage in traffic, amount of coal used on a journey between Bristol and London, cost of building--are presented on an adjacent wall. Visitors seemed to enjoy the unusual experience of walking underneath the engine in an inspection pit. Though nowadays best practice tends not to encourage the iconic display of large transport objects, this display works...