The Works National Railway Museum, York

The National Railway Museum in York is the world's largest railway museum. Its collections include 103 locomotives and 177 other items of rolling stock, 3,300 models, 6,500 items of silver and crockery, more than 300 nameplates, 350,000 tickets, 1,800 buttons, 350,000 engineering drawings, 7,500 posters, 200 original works of art, and 1.4 million photographic negatives. It exhibits not only trains and locomotives but also corresponding system components, providing a good context for the main attractions, such as the Royal Trains and the locomotive collection. It explains the course of British railway history from its origins to modern train systems such as the Eurostar. In July 1999, the museum opened a new extension housing The Works, a permanent exhibit divided into three main sections: workshop, working railway, and warehouse.

Visitors enter the workshop on the second floor level, and from there one can watch the museum's conservation staff at work on rolling stock and smaller artifacts on the first floor. A gallery throws light on many key topics. Materials on the York Carriage Works connect the museum with the city and show people from distant places the industrial heritage ofYork. A section on women in the railway manufacturing industry illustrates their important wartime role and their complete replacement by men after the war. Another section on failed components tackles the issue of technical risks, bringing the topic alive with a display of a coupling hook that broke during a derailment and material on historic railway accidents.

The working railway part of the exhibit deals with security issues in a broad sense--timing, communications, signaling, train control, braking, and weather conditions. At the end, a display on the East Coast Main Line brings the visitor into the present and the operation of a modern rail line. In addition to the usual sort of exhibitry, here the visitor can step out on the balcony and see the real thing: the East Coast Main Line runs directly in front of the building, which looks out onto York station and the medieval city. Loudspeaker announcements blare, monitors on the balcony show live video from a nearby junction, and visitors can observe a directly connected copy of the signal table from York Signalling Centre. This was the most impressive feature of the new wing and makes perfect use of the museum's environment.

The warehouse displays some of the museum's collections to the public, unconserved and uncontextualized; the artifacts are indexed in a catalog, providing the visitor with a basic finding aid. The value of such a display of objects is debatable, but it does allow the public to understand more fully what museum work is like and how many resources it requires.

All three sections of the exhibition include artifacts, but these serve different functions. In the workshop the process of conservation is demonstrated; rarely does an outsider have the opportunity to observe actual work on exhibits so closely. (Another good example is the Flugwerft of the Deutsches Museum in Oberschleißheim, Germany.) A few carefully chosen items also illustrate the materials in the gallery, their scarcity emphasizing their significance. In the warehouse, artifacts communicate the functions of the museum and the size of the collections.

The exhibit designers and curators clearly subscribe to the philosophy that a picture is worth a thousand words, and The Works makes good use of historical photographs, graphics, and comic figures for children. A technique of using different picture layers and merging them into a kind of collage melts different dimensions into one illustration. It might, however, distract some visitors.

The exhibit texts are short and comprehensible. Video sequences on, for example, the history ofYork Carriage Works and the construction of a steam locomotive complement the written material. In an interactive exhibit, the visitor can act as the signaler at a signalbox; this unfortunately was not especially successful, as there was only one train available, which did...