THOMAS the Tank Engine may have paid his last blockbusting visit to York's National Railway Museum (NRM) after bosses admitted they were wrong to charge all museum visitors last time.

The NRM was embroiled in controversy when it imposed an entry fee during the popular Day Out With Thomas fortnight in February, less than three months after admission prices had been scrapped by the Government.

The decision was exposed in December by the Evening Press after an internal document was passed to the paper.

Rail buffs warned that visitors who had come to see just the permanent collection and expected free admission would be unhappy at having to pay a fee of up to £6.

Now Government Arts Minister Tessa Blackstone has revealed in a letter to Vale of York MP Anne McIntosh that she raised the issue with the director of the National Museum of Science and Industry, of which the NRM is a part.

His verdict was that the decision to impose charges on visitors solely interested in seeing the permanent collection was a "misunderstanding" on the museum's part, which would not happen again.

Graham Stratfold, the museum's head of visitor services, said today that the NRM had misunderstood permission granted by the Government to impose a Thomas entry fee. It had wrongly thought that this entitled it to charge all visitors.

He said visitors who came to the NRM in February to see Thomas had been happy with the charge. But there had been complaints from others who had come just to see the permanent collection.

Now the museum was reviewing whether it would be practicable to hold another Thomas event during the 2003 February half-term.

The exhibition, which attracted 62,500 visitors in a fortnight this year, was expensive to stage and would only be viable if a charge could be imposed.

A key question was whether the Thomas event could be restricted sufficiently to one area of the museum - probably outdoors - so that a specific charge could be imposed for its visitors, while free entry was maintained to the rest of the site. But if this was done, numbers would have to be restricted for health and safety reasons.

York railway enthusiast John Rathmell, who complained to Anne McIntosh about the original decision, said it had been wrong to make people pay to see the national collection, regardless of whether they wanted to see Thomas.

Another rail buff, David Henderson, who also objected to the February charges, welcomed the new decision. "It's a big milestone," he said.

Updated: 11:10 Thursday, April 18, 2002