It is the home of the national collection of historically significant railway vehicles such as Mallard, Stirling Single, Duchess of Hamilton and a Japanese bullet train.

The collection also includes fine jewellery worn by railway queens,[clarification needed] models of planes, boats and hovercraft, and experimental technologies such as Louis Brennan's Gyroscopic Mono-rail car.

A "roadtrain" runs from the city centre (near York Minster) to the museum on Leeman Road during half-term, holidays and summer.

[11] It houses more of the National Collection in a new building and a historic site around the former workshop of Timothy Hackworth and in the most recent full year for which figures have been published (2011–2012), it attracted more than 210,000 visitors.

There are approximately 280 rail vehicles in the National Collection, with around 100 being at York at any one time and the remainder divided between Locomotion at Shildon and other museums and heritage railways.

This includes an internationally significant collection of locomotive and rolling stock engineering drawings from railway works and independent manufacturing companies.

Coppernob at Barrow-in-Furness, Derwent and Locomotion at Darlington and Tiny at Newton Abbot were long-lived examples of this form of display.

Indeed, two of the Great Western Railway's earliest broad-gauge locomotives, North Star and Lord of the Isles, which had been set aside at Swindon Works, were cut up in 1906 for lack of space and several other relics were similarly lost in subsequent years.

centenary in 1925;[38] and which then formed the basis of a museum opened at York by the London and North Eastern Railway in 1928 under the curatorship of E. M. Bywell.

The GWR assembled a valuable collection of small objects, mounted privately in a long corridor at Paddington station, and in 1925 it built a replica of North Star.

It also began to build up a collection of historic locomotives, which included Caledonian 123, Columbine, Cornwall, Hardwicke, Highland 103, Midland 118 and Pet.

For the latter, the former station at Nine Elms was originally favoured as a site, but what was eventually opened in 1961 was the Museum of British Transport in a former bus garage in Clapham.

[44][45] An official list of locomotives for preservation was compiled,[46][47][48] and many were stored in sheds and works throughout the country, others being placed on loan to local authority museums.

[52] The building provided was the former locomotive roundhouse at York North (rebuilt in the 1950s), alongside the East Coast Main Line.

Exhibits from the previous museums at York and Clapham moved to the new site were supplemented by vehicles taken from storage at Preston Park in Brighton and elsewhere and restored.

By comparison with the museum's predecessors coverage of ordinary passenger coaches and non-steam motive power was enhanced, but a popular new exhibit was ex-Southern Railway Merchant Navy Class No.

Another working replica was added to the collection for the 150th anniversary of establishment of the Great Western Railway in 1985: that of the 7 ft (2,134 mm) broad gauge locomotive Iron Duke.

Concerns about the condition of the concrete roof structure on the main building brought forward major changes to the museum in 1990.

[65][66] It was reopened on 16 April 1992 by Prince Edward, Duke of Kent as the Great Hall giving enhanced opportunities to display large artifacts such as railway signals, a footbridge from Percy Main station and a segment from the Channel Tunnel.

In 1995 the museum joined forces with the University of York to create an academic research base, the Institute of Railway Studies (and Transport History).

This gave several functional areas: the Workshop, for maintenance of rolling stock;[70] the Workshop Gallery, from which the public can look down on this work; a Working Railway Gallery, giving an insight into current and recent operation including a balcony overlooking York railway station hosting a set of monitors showing live feeds from the monitors at York IECC;[71] and the Warehouse which provides an innovative open storage area, which has proved popular with both public and museum professionals.

To that end its workings were exposed in the style of a larger open air funicular railway, rather than being concealed in the fabric of the building as is more normal for intramural lifts.

The first stage of a new centre providing easy access to the museum's Library and Archives, called "Search Engine",[77][78] opened at the end of 2007.

From 18 July to 23 August 2008, a popular new venture was the staging by York Theatre Royal at the Museum of the play of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, awarded five stars in The Guardian.

[79][80] Following this success, it was repeated in 2009, from 23 July to 3 September, and the museum provided locomotives for subsequent performances at Waterloo International station and in Toronto.

Major plans under the name "NRM+" were made for refurbishing the Great Hall display, for which a preliminary Heritage Lottery Fund contribution was announced in 2009,[81] and seeking potential partners for a further outhousing project.

[87] In 2012, the NRM decided to repatriate temporarily the two LNER A4 class steam locomotives, numbers 60008 Dwight D Eisenhower and 60010 Dominion of Canada from their respective North American homes at the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin and Exporail in Montreal, as part of the 'Mallard 75' event in 2013.

[92] Criticisms of the museum which have been raised include claims that it has devoted insufficient attention to modern traction;[93][94][95] that it was neglecting scholarship in favour of commercialism;[96] or that its photographic collections constitute a "black hole".

[99][100] Previously the museum has treated rolling stock as if it were effectively still in railway service and capable of undergoing repeated heavy repairs and restoration.

[103] The Museum's management of the protracted overhaul of LNER Class A3 4472 Flying Scotsman was heavily criticised in an internally commissioned report in 2012.