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National Railway Museum scraps £21m upgrade plan

In a statement, NRM director Steve Davies said on 15 April:

"We formally learnt on Monday 11 April that our bid for £7m from the Regional Growth Fund (RGF) had failed. The bid was always a long-shot, and was made to compensate for the loss of two blocks of £5-million; one each from Yorkshire Forward and DCMS. "We had already reached tentative agreement with Heritage Lottery Fund that our bid to them would increase from £7-million to £10-million to compensate, hence the logic behind the £7-million figure we requested from the RGF.

"We are already well past the two-year deadline set by HLF following our Stage 1 pass, but in any event the prognosis is that there is absolutely no chance in the current climate of us closing the significant funding gap we now face. Ian Blatchford (director of the National Museum of Science & Industry), the NMSI board of trustees and I now share the view that NRM+ as a cohesive project is no longer viable and will therefore be cancelled.

"We will now consider our options. Our vision beyond the next five years is clear, and we have other exciting projects in the offing, including the recently begun redevelopment of the museum’s city entrance and shop, and refurbishment of Station Hall. Moreover, we are in a position to make some minor but significant adjustments to the Great Hall, making use of vehicles which were restored in anticipation of NRM+ being successfully delivered.

"So although this is clearly a major disappointment, and not only to those who have been most closely involved with the project these past few years, we are nevertheless in a position to maintain momentum in other ways."

As reported in Heritage Railway issue 143, NRM+ was to have been the most radical remake of the museum in its history.

It aimed to create the undisputed finest railway museum in the world and increase visitor numbers by 33 per cent to a million a year, bringing multiple benefits to the York and regional economy, and which is earmarked for completion by 2013.

The first phase was based around a redevelopment of the Great Hall, and moving emphasis away from the current policy of displaying as many historic locomotives as possible inside the space, to retelling the story of the history of railways and the part they played in the development of society through a series of seven themed galleries.

The centrepiece of the scheme was to have been a new bridge link talking visitors from a main entrance above the Great Hall where they will have a panoramic view of the exhibits, before taking a tour through the galleries.

The biggest difference as far as many enthusiasts are concerned was that there would have been fewer items of rolling stock. However, this would be counterbalanced by the fact that thousands of smaller exhibits, many of which currently have no display space, would be placed on show, linking in with larger exhibits to tell a wider story.

The galleries were being designed on the themes of moving people, moving goods, building and running railways, railway nations, a cultural concourse and ‘explorail’, the interpretation of railways.

There would have been a greater emphasis on visitor facilities, and it was the museum’s intention to develop the best café in the city.