I thought while I had a chance and before I got bogged down too much with my subsequent trip, I should do the entry for my trip to York.
Quick background - York has been a must-do on my list for here since probably ever - mainly (well, solely) the National Railway Museum is there. This is the museum full of the famous locomotives and carriages of Great Britain (i.e. England, Wales and Scotland - not Northern Island). Rachel sent me an email from East Coast railways saying they had cheap fares to York - soon after reading the email and some searching around for the cheapest fares I could find for a day before christmas, I had myself a day trip to York on the 17th December.
So the morning of Wedesday 17th, I boarded my 7.08am train to York (it was early, but cheap). York is some distance away from London - the distance is probably Wellington to Ohakune or Christchurch to Dunedin maybe. But thanks to the wonders of British high speed trains, I was in York by 9.26am with my ride on the Intercity 225 trainset quite a pleasant one, zipping along at 200km/h for most of the way.
Problem was, the museum didn't open to 10.00am and it was right next door to the train station. So what did I do for half an hour? I waited outside and did the last blog post. When it opened I was given a brochure - entry is free but I was asked if I wanted to buy the official tour book. It was only £6 and was quite a thick A4 book so thought I might as well. I followed the signs into the museum and found myself in the station hall area which surprised me as I thought the Great Hall would be first. No matter, I looked over and around the assembled Royal train coaches behind LMS locos (seems only LMS pulled Royal trains) and the few other wagons on view there. You couldn't go in the Royal cars, but could see Queen Elizabeth's 1960's green decor and Queen Victria's overdone opulence through the windows. Taking photos while holding the book proved cumbersome and I regretted buying it - but it redeemed itself when I realised I could use it to shade reflections in the windows for the camera. Once that was done (didn't take too long) i went outside where a small green tank engine called "Teddy" was giving Santa train rides pulling a carriage. You needed an extra ticket for the Santa rides; I wasn't interested in paying what they wanted to shuffle up and down a siding for 5mins, and besides I think they were sold out.
So then I went back inside, and wondered where the Great Hall was. You almost had to go past the entrance counters and then through some doors to the left, which took you to an underpass. At the end of the underpass was another building, go through the doors and there you are.
As soon as you enter the Great Hall, you are confronted by the streamlined shape of Duchess of Hamilton. The Brit's hate the engine in this guise (it's only looked like this for about 4-6 years, before that it looked more normal) but it's how the engine was when it was built and looks quite neat, especially coupled up to an appropriate carriage in matching colour scheme. Nearby was the faux fronts of a Eurostar and HST125, but a real Series 0 Bullet train car. The relevance of a Japanese train in a museum about British trains was lost on me but it was very neat, you can even go inside it. Then there were an array of engines around the turntable - "Evening Star", the last steam loco build for British Railways in 1960 (and withdrawn in 1965!); "Ellerman Lines", one of the biggest engines in Britain and sectioned on one side to try and show how as steam loco works; next to it a replica of the "Rocket", also sectioned; "King George V", the first of Great Western's biggest class of loco; a Ffestiniog Double Fairlie; a Chinese Railways KF7 (at least the loco was actually manufactured in the UK); On the turntable, "City of Truro" the first engine to reach 100mph; a smattering of diesels, not really any of note; and lastly the prize exhibit, the A4 4468 "Mallard" which set (and still holds) the official top speed record for a steam locomotive.
"Mallard" is the same type of engine as "Union of South Africa", the engine I rode behind two or so weeks earlier to Lincoln. To mark 75 years since it set the record, they assembled all the remaining A4's together here in the hall for quite some time - which involved repatriating temporarily 2 that now live in the USA. But they all dispersed earlier in the year! A surprise though was being able to go inside Mallards cab under the watchful eye of an attendant. It was a bit quiet and I was the only visitor in the cab, so after chatting to the attendant for a bit I then put him to good use. I can now say I've sat in the drivers seat and held the throttle of the fastest steam loco in the world - and I have photos to prove it!
After that, I went into the adjacent hall where there was information about Flying Scotsman; a Deltic diesel (D9009, didn't catch it's name); shelves upon shelves upon shelves of models, historical items and railwayana; an outside balcony where you could watch trains go into York Station, with the train times displayed on a screen (wasn't that interesting); and then the Workshop, which had a lot of information about Flying Scotsman but nothing to say what was actually in the workshop and what you were seeing. There was a diesel of some type, a black tender, a small tank engine partly dismantled on a wagon, and behind it a large boiler clad in black. Took me a minute to realise the tender and boiler belong to Flying Scotsman, and were black because when they thought they almost had it fixed they put it on display in it's Wartime Black; I was surprised to see the boiler and tender here, because most of the rest of it is elsewhere getting fixed properly and I thought all of it was elsewhere.
Then that was it - no more to be seen. Literally a "wait that's it?" moment. I felt a bit disappointed, to be honest - probably because I didn't realise such a huge part of the collection is housed in their 'Part 2' museum at Shildon; the selection of locos at the museum felt a bit haphazard and didn't represent an overall spread of British locos through history. That, and there was empty track room to put extra ones on display - must have been a hangover from having all the other A4's on display there. But it was good. And it was about 2pm.
To fill the rest of the time before 6pm, I wandered into York itself. I headed towards the big York Minster cathedral, went inside and saw you could do roof tours and also have a look underneath the cathedral. The idea of a roof tour has appealed since my Lincoln trip, so I paid the money for a roof tour and look around. I had to wait until the 3.15pm tour, but that gave me 20mins or so to look around the rest of the Cathedral minus the underneath. The roof tour involved walking up a lot of spiral stone stairs, then across a walkway next to part of the roof, then more spiral stairs but the view over York was neat. I spent maybe 20mins up there before stumbling down, and then went to the underneath. This part was actually quite cool - it took you on a walk under the Cathedral's foundations and explained how in the 1960's the Cathedral was close to collapse, as the foundations were from an earlier cathedral that couldn't take the weight of the present one. In the process of building new foundations they found lots of stuff, including the remains of a Roman garrison building; the remains of the earlier Norman and Gothic cathedrals; part of a former cemetery from the 1300's and all sorts. It's all been done up in the last few years and it's an excellent walk around. One quirk, there was a couple walking around with a weird device that looked like a RT radio but blipped a bit like a Geiger counter. Curiousity got the better of me and I asked them what it was - an electromagnetic reciever. They said they go round measuring electromagnetism, usually they don't get readings much over 0.8 and usually less or nothing - but they were getting high readings over 2.0 down there. Read into that what you will...
After that, it was off to the station, grabbed some dinner from one of the many platform food shops, then hopped on my 6.09pm train back to Kings Cross which was an HST125 - I hoped it might be, meaning I'd travelled on both of the two types of train East Coast run on that route. And that was pretty much that - in all a good day out! Mind you by then I was a bit preoccupied with what the next day would bring - but that's another blog post!