Full steam ahead: The restoration of the iconic Flying Scotsman will be completed by late 2015
When visiting industrial heritage museums, it’s easy to forget the hard work of the curators and staff in putting together these collections for our enjoyment. Not only do they preserve important pieces of engineering history but they attempt to bring the subject to life for modern audiences.
For the staff at the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, looking after the country’s rail collection, which boasts more than a million objects spanning 300 years of history, is a complex task.
Anthony Coulls, head curator of rail vehicles and self-confessed thwarted mechanical engineer, has worked in museums all his professional life. He explains that one tricky aspect of his role is deciding what heritage items to exhibit – not always as easy as it sounds.
Coulls says: “It’s got to have a popular appeal. It’s no use having an exhibition of signalmen’s lunch boxes. You must strike the balance between exhibitions engineers will love and what the general public will be interested in.”
The museum’s public programmes team plans exhibitions by keeping abreast of events and anniversaries in the railway industry, and significant happenings for the vehicles in the collection. Some shows focus on the social impact of railways. For example in the spring the museum is planning its Playing Trains exhibition looking at the model railways that people have created.
A recent major project has been in creating an exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral. This came about owing to the fact that the museum possesses the very engine named after the former prime minister that pulled the funeral train.
Coulls says that the museum has had the engine in its possession since the 1960s, and it has often been held in storage or loaned out to railways, so was not in a good state of repair. “Nothing had been done to the engine conservation-wise since 1965,” he says. “It was rotting from the inside out. Non-ferrous parts had been lost during its period in store and there was corrosion coming from inside the boiler casing. Its asbestos lagging needed removing, and jagged edges and holes were appearing – it wasn’t fit for display.”
So came an important decision that often needs to be made with such projects – to restore or repair? Deciding the course of action can be tough, explains Coulls: “We look at each vehicle and determine how much intervention we need to do. Do we not touch it at all? Do we go the whole hog and repair it to running order, or do we meet somewhere in between? For Winston Churchill we met in the middle as we wanted to reflect it as it was in 1965 rather than as it was straight out of the factory.”
Winston Churchill: Engine restored to its former glory
A cosmetic restoration is still a costly enterprise, running at several tens of thousands of pounds. On this project the friends of the NRM stepped in to raise money. The next stage of Coulls’ job is researching and sourcing original drawings and photographs to ensure that the restoration is historically accurate. “We studied photographs of the Winston Churchill on the last day it operated as well as freeze frames of the Pathé newsreel of the funeral to look at the details on the engine,” he says.
From there they could determine the smallest of design details, down to the kind of bronze wing nuts that were used on the headlamps.
Although the museum has its own engineering workshop, the staff were too busy to do most of the cosmetic restoration themselves. Instead the engine was sent to Mid Hants Railway whose team worked hard on their own historic research as well as addressing corrosion issues. The result was a very sympathetic restoration, says Coulls.
That isn’t to say that the York engineering team didn’t get involved. Simon Holroyd, engineering manager at NRM, and the two other members of the workshop team, replaced a lot of the missing fittings, valves and components on the loco.
The restoration future-proofed the engine in case a decision to rebuild it to full running condition is taken in the future. Holroyd says: “Over the years the engine lost much of what it needs to operate, probably onto other exhibits, so the decision was taken to replace many of the parts, including the live steam injectors which are very complicated.” These often cost up to £25,000 a piece so the cost-saving decision was made to manufacture them in-house.
“Everything we’ve made for it is new,” says Holroyd. “Our chief machinist Danny Holmes has spent the best part of six months making all the components for it.”
As a three-strong outfit, the workshop team are never short of things to do, says Holroyd. Not only do they maintain the museum’s many exhibitions, they restore and repair locos, such as the work they are carrying out on the famous Flying Scotsman and their recently completed restoration of the diesel locomotive Prince William. In addition they maintain the museum’s engines Teddy and Rocket which offer visitor rides, as well as three shunting diesel locos and two mainline diesels.
Holroyd says that when working on such big machines – the Flying Scotsman weighs 150 tonnes – the museum’s specialised workshop is a saving grace. “We have a fabulously equipped workshop – there is nothing we can’t do or make in there,” he says.
“We have cranes and a big wheel drop so we can take a complete wheel set out of a steam loco for service. So rather than having to lift the engine we can drop stuff out from underneath.” Nearly all the machinery is itself part of the heritage, with most of the lathes, milling machines, planers and slotters from the 1940s-50s.
Return to the rails: NRM employees restored Prince William to mainline condition
When the locos are restored to exhibition standards there is a final challenge to tackle – moving the giant machines into the museum building. Alternatively, many engines go on loan to other heritage centres and must be transported across country. Noel Hartley, operations manager at the NRM, says it is not a task to be taken lightly. It is undertaken after opening hours using a 70ft turntable installed in the museum’s great hall, which used to be a roundhouse used for servicing locomotives.
“The issue is that because all our vehicles are dead they cannot drive themselves onto the turntable. So what we do is push them around the hall with a fork-lift truck and onto the turntable. When it is on the turntable you can then turn it and pick it up with a diesel shunting.”
The next logistical challenge is to get the loco out of the museum. The NRM site is surrounded by railways, with two height-restricted bridges either side. Hartley says to take anything away it must travel on Network Rail lines to the nearby Holgate carriage works.
It will then either be taken away by road or be shunted along the railway by a modern engine operated by an approved heritage contractor.
To do this the museum engine must pass safety inspections, have the connecting rods removed so the pistons and valves cannot move, and go through ultrasonic axle tests before it can travel at 15mph on the main line.
Hartley adds: “We are next to York station, by one of the busiest railways in the UK. What we have to do is take one of our ancient museum pieces through the station – you can’t do that at 9am or 5pm.” There will be up 30 of these moves a year.
The next big project nearing completion for the NRM, says Coulls, is the rebuild of the Flying Scotsman. “It is probably the largest steam engineering job short of building a new one,” he says. “It has been nearly 10 years and has uncovered a lot of engineering challenges.”
Most of the unsung heroes working hard to keep these important heritage pieces alive are happy to remain behind the scenes and let the carefully crafted exhibitions do the talking. Coulls says: “It’s all about the people who built them, who ran them, who travelled on them. We are all touched by railways, and it’s about unlocking that which can make the humble coal wagon become a showpiece in an exhibition.”