ILLUMINATING York may not be the largest festival of light in Britain, nor the one with the biggest budget, but it is the most innovative, believes Liz Page, chairman of the festival steering board.

For evidence, she points to six of this week's light installations and artworks being new commissions for the 11th year of a festival supported by Arts Council England and promoted by Make It York.

Among the transformative works is the first commission to shed new light on the National Railway Museum in Leeman Road. More particularly, to shed light on perhaps the most functional of all the NRM's exhibition areas: the Workshop with its persistent smell of engine oil.

Illuminating York regulars will be au fait with Locos in a Different Light, where each year the halls and locomotives are transformed with colour and light by theatre lighting design students – always one of the most beautiful, even awe-inspiring, sights of the year in York – but artists Heinrich and Palmer set themselves the innovative challenge of working with the nuts and bolts of the museum.

Normally, NRM visitors can look down on engines being stripped, refurbished, repaired and restored, but Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer, collaborating pioneers of large-scale illuminated art since 1991, now bring projection, light drawings, film and sound into the working heart of the NRM.

To do so, they utilise the museum archives to bring the utilitarian Workshop to new life in Travelling Light. "We've been crawling around to look under the engines to see how we could light the Workshop," says Leon. "We wanted illuminate it, creating more light than you might expect when the museum lights are switched off, but not flooding it with light."

It is a delicate balancing act, one driven by the other element in the installation that interacts with the Workshop: a translucent screen with imagery that constantly changes and reacts to the lighting, as you look through it to see the workshop and engines beyond.

Leon mentions such terms as "point cloud", and those of a non-scientific nature need not worry themselves with the technical aspects of Travelling Light, but let's just say it calls on modern engineering practice. Stephenson's Rocket, The Mallard, the Workshop and even the Great Hall have been laser-scanned and their imagery is replicated on the "fly-through" video screen, ever on the move in ghostly, spectral shades that then magically absorb colours from the lit-up workshop.

"The idea was that we wanted to make a piece that brought this very special place into focus but doing it in a very contemporary way," says Leon. "We've also used bass sounds to create a soundtrack to accompany the installation, and overall it's come out as quite a ghostly piece, which we had not envisaged, as you don't know exactly how it will turn out."

Describing Heinrich and Palmer as "a couple of bods working away in a mad scientist way", Leon concludes: "We're not train buffs but we love travel and the romance of travelling on a train."

Heinrich and Palmer's Travelling Light, at The Workshop, National Railway Museum, York, forms part of Illuminating York, tonight to Saturday, 6pm to 10pm; free admission.