York Railway Museum

Maybe it was being brought up in Wylam, birthplace of George Stephenson (inventor of The Rocket), a tiny village with two stations (North and South), but I have loved trains since I was a bairn.
I'd seen York Railway Museum through the train window so many times but never visited, so before meeting the Whitfields for lunch I spent a couple of hours there completely absorbed by the wonderful trains and railway ephemera. There were so many beautiful locomotives they probably deserve a post of their own.
I loved the painted lettering, the practicality of everything, the kissing buffers, the enamelled signs, the samovars, the normal peculiarity. The only thing that I didn't like was the poor stuffed dog, who had been a charity dog in London and was rewarded by being taxidermied and put on display. What a terrible fate! I imagined charity ladies being treated in the same way, and it made my toes curl. I have taken billions of photographs of the insides of steam trains, copper pipes, steel pipes, rivets, signs, wheels and everything you could possibly imagine. Wow. And they knew that I lived in High Barnet!