Yesterday a trip to Swindon and the chance to visit STEAM – the museum of the Great Western railway. The museum is housed in ‘R’ shed of the Old Great western Works at Swindon – once the biggest railway facility in the world.
With the changes in railway structure in the UK and the decreased need for building and maintenance of locomotives and carriages, the works closed in 1986. The old works area has now become a new development area including housing, a shopping outlet centre, the headquarters of the National Trust and the English heritage archive and National monuments records centre.
STEAM opened in 2000 and celebrates the works at Swindon where in its busiest was building 2 locomotives a week not to mention all the carriages and wagons to go with them.
There are a lot of video panels where ex-members of staff at Swindon describe the work of each part of the facility. This gives an interesting insight into the day to day life in the works. In this way it has a different approach to many rail museums which tend to focus on the trains and the railway itself. That is not to say these are not lauded in the displays as well and the museum has a small selection of representative GWR locos (Caerphilly Castle; Ditchet Manor; Lode Star; a couple of Goods locos and a 1925 replica of a broad-gauge engine – a further loco Hagley Hall can be seen in the shopping outlet next door (which is also built within the preserved buildings of the railway works) and a station exhibit area showing what a typical GWR station would have looked like in the 1930’s.
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