A £21 MILLION pound project to transform the Great Hall at York’s National Railway Museum (NRM) has been abandoned in the wake of Government cuts.
Bosses at the museum in Leeman Road said they had taken the “sad” decision that the NRM+ scheme was no longer viable after an application for £7 million from the Regional Growth Fund was turned down earlier this month.
The project had been set to tell the spectacular story of how railways have shaped lives and the modern world through new multimedia and multi-sensory displays.
There would also have been greater access to the collection and improved visitor facilities, and the work was expected to increase visitor numbers to 1.15 million per year and boost the regional economy by £25 million.
But there was at least some good news for railway buffs with the announcement that, because of the cancellation of the scheme, the iconic Mallard locomotive would be coming back to the NRM before the end of the year, instead of 2013, when NRM+ had been due to finish.
A spokeswoman said yesterday that the growth fund bid had been made to compensate for the loss of two grants of £5 million, from Yorkshire Forward and the Department of Culture Media and Sport.
She said the museum had received the tentative agreement of the Heritage Lottery Fund to provide match-funding of £10 million if the growth fund bid was successful, but that was now lost as well.
She said, after assessing the impact, the museum realised there was no chance in the current climate of closing the significant funding gap.
The £1.8 million in funding which had already been secured from private and public sources would now go to other work.
She said: “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.”
She said Mallard, which left the NRM last year for Locomotion, the National Railway Museum at Shildon, County Durham, would be the star attraction in an exhibition at a museum in Nuremberg, Germany, marking the 75th anniversary of Germany’s short ownership of the world-speed crown, before returning to York in November.
Steve Davies, NRM director, said: “We’re very excited that Mallard is going to fly the flag for British engineering in Germany, at an event run by our international partner, the DB Museum.
“It should be a fascinating journey – Mallard will leave her current home, the National Railway Museum in Shildon, by road, and then will travel by ship to a German port. Once there, she will travel along the tracks hauled by a DB locomotive, accompanied by the NRM’s expert engineers and observed by hundreds of rail fans.”
Meanwhile, the museum is looking forward to bumper crowds over the two bank holiday weekends.
Its spokeswoman said: “We’re definitely hoping for an increase in visitor numbers, come rain or shine.”
Every cloud has a silver lining
IT IS desperately disappointing that the National Railway Museum has had to abandon a multi-million pound project to transform its Great Hall.
The scheme, which would have seen the hall revamped with multimedia and multisensory displays that told the story of how the railways have shaped the modern world, is yet another victim of Government cuts.
The museum decided to pull the plug after its bid for £7 million from the Regional Growth Fund was turned down. As a result, it also lost all hope of securing £10 million of match funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Museum bosses estimated that if the scheme had gone ahead, it would have increased visitor numbers to 1.15 million a year – and would have boosted the regional economy by £25 million.
This, then, is a genuinely damaging blow to this city’s and this region’s attempts to recover from the recession.
In one sense, however, it is perhaps understandable. At a time of deep public spending cuts, when across the country vital services for vulnerable people are being slashed to the bone, there might have been a few raised eyebrows in some quarters at so much Government money being spent on a museum.
And there is a silver lining to this news. Because the revamp of the Great Hall will not now be going ahead, the iconic Mallard will return to York two years earlier than it would otherwise have done. The National Railway Museum remains, meanwhile, one of the world’s truly great museums: a fantastic family day out, as well as an inspiring record of the way the railways made us what we are today. York is lucky to have it.
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