National Railway Museum tour & York social

On Friday 27th March, several of us were fortunate enough to enjoy a tour of the National Railway Museum in York through a uniquely queer lens. The wonderful Ashlynn Hudson-Welburn, curator at the NRM, guided us around the exhibits while sharing the stories of LGBTQ+ contributions to railways and in turn the impact that railways have had on LGBTQ+ culture.

Some of the tour group pose in front of The Flying Scotsman in the NRM Great Hall

Ashlynn covered a range of topics: the vastly increased mobility and horizon-expanding impact of railways that allowed LGBTQ+ people to travel to form communities, the privacy afforded by railway carriage compartments that could allow LGBTQ+ liaisons to happen away from prying eyes, the establishment of railway hotels that afforded similar privacy, and the clusters of LGBTQ+ venues that have formed near to railway stations. This blog by Ashlynn goes into more detail about some of these themes.

We also heard about the personal contributions such as Ron Whalley who designed the braking system of the InterCity 125 trains, credited with being the saviour of British Rail in the 1970s and 80s. Were it not for the vastly improved braking responsiveness that Ron innovated by moving from pure air systems to electronically controlled ones, the uplift in speeds and significant reductions in journey times delivered by the IC125s would not have happened and railways would have continued losing ground to cars. Another story was that of Lillian 'Curly' Lawrence, a transgender model-maker born in 1883 who was a prolific and trailblazing designer and maker of scale models of steam engines, as well as writing thousands of articles for model-making magazines. We gathered around the Class 76 electric loco from the now-closed Woodhead Route linking Manchester to Sheffield and heard about Charles Beyer, who founded Gorton loco works where the loco was built, and heard about the 'Pink depots' of London Underground while looking at a replica of the Victoria Line tunnels.

Finally, the tour listened to clips from the NRM's People, Pride and Progress oral history project and had discussions about them in smaller groups, in turn being recorded as part of the project.

It was a hugely insightful and enjoyable tour for which Journey members from Alstom, AtkinsRealis, Hitachi Rail, Southwest Railway and Transport for London who attended were extremely grateful to Ashlynn and her team not just for the tour but also for the tireless work to curate the history of railways, and in particular their LGBTQ+ history. Afterwards, we had a lovely social in York - Journey's first in the city.

The first Journey York social!