The sheer presence of a steam locomotive is unforgettable. For many of us, the railway is more than just infrastructure — it’s a shared, visceral memory: the hiss, the smoke, the clang of the buffer, the sense of immense, beautiful engineering. It speaks to the railway’s lasting impact on our imagination and our national story.
This year, as we celebrate the National Railway Museum’s 50th birthday and the bicentenary of the modern railway in the UK, we are delighted to announce a major new project with Google Arts & Culture: Beyond the Tracks. This work embraces the digital revolution the railway helped inspire, ensuring this powerful history belongs to everyone, everywhere.
At the Science Museum Group, our mission is to inspire future innovators and make the UK’s unparalleled national collection accessible to all. Beyond the Tracks is an expansion of the museum experience, bringing the transformative story of the railway to a global audience. To reveal new stories from our archives, we experimented withGoogle Arts & Culture’s new AI-powered Metadata Enhancement Service to transcribe handwritten documents and artifacts, making these invaluable historical records searchable and accessible to all.
This project is the latest step in our long-standing partnership with Google Arts & Culture. For example, earlier this year we launched an eight-part educational storytelling series. These stories showcase fascinating items from our collection to bring fundamental scientific concepts to life for learners worldwide, covering topics ranging from Connecting the World and Taking Flight to the history of Home Cooking and an overview of the Energy Transition. Now, with Beyond the Tracks, we are focused on sharing new stories about our railway history.
Step aboard in 360 degrees
For the first time, you can virtually step inside the Locomotion museum in Shildon, County Durham, which is home to Europe’s largest undercover collection of historic railway vehicles. Three new virtual tours allow you to wander through Locomotion, including the immense Main Hall, appreciating heritage rail vehicles at their true, colossal scale, and the New Hall, designed as a traditional engine shed. You can even trace history itself by walking the historic Brusselton Incline, part of the world’s first public railway from 1825.
