CIOB Teesside Centre Site Visit to the Darlington Railway Museum Development Project
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
A Tour of the Darlington Railway Museum on Saturday 8 September was the first of this year's events for the CIOB Teeside Centre.
John Wilkes, project development manager for the Darlington Railway gave an outline the current projects and construction work being carried out.
The roof has been finished over the museum building and the contractors are waiting for permission from Network Rail to begin re-roofing the train shed over the live line.
Several additional downpipes will be added to the drainage system to help get large amounts of water off the roof - which will be essential if the heavy rain we’ve had over the last few months continues!
The locomotive moves are now complete and all in their new places on the tracks. The engines have been covered with special plastic sheeting so that they will be protected whilst the contractors repaint the main museum.
The contractors have been on site for a few weeks and are busy with the rooms in the west wing. They have also been working on re-laying and levelling flagstones at the entrance and on the external platform area. Work has also begun to replace the heating system.
The roof work is almost complete, with an estimated two to three weeks of work left. The roof is being re-slated with Welsh slate, as it would have had originally. This work includes the museum building and the train shed over the live railway on the Darlington to Bishop Auckland route.
This will mean that the roof will now look as it would have done when the station was first built in 1842, and extended in the 1870’s and 1890’s.
Locomotives have been moved around the museum and also out to new homes. Blue Peter has now gone to a new home in Barrow Hill, near Chesterfield. At the same time, the North Eastern Locomotive Group’s P3 locomotive (No 2392) has been moved ‘across the field’ to their depot in the Hopetown Carriage works building.
‘Locomotion’ and ‘Derwent’ have been prepared by specialist staff for their relocation from the Museum platform onto the rails. This has involved the removal of parts of the mechanism as well as general oiling and lubricating.
A restored Chaldron (wooden bodied coal wagon) has arrived from Beamish Museum to be displayed behind ‘Locomotion’ to represent the opening train on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the new displays.
'Locomotion' was not the first steam engine in the world, nor was she reliable or efficient, but these issues pale into insignificance by the mere fact of her place in history as the first locomotive to pull a passenger railway train.
Today she stands within the walls of her first railway station at Darlington, a proud memorial to the pioneers who revolutionised passenger transport throughout the world.
But this story is not just about a railway company or a locomotive, but about people, communities and the way lives were changed with the advent of this wondrous industrial innovation.
Today a new Steam Engine is being built, the first in 50 years to be run on the mainline. It has taken 15 years to get in its present state and will take another 5 years to be completed.
