The Museum of Science & Industry has come a long way from its early days on the corner of Upper Brook Street and Cavendish Street. It was housed in a fine building with a wonderful mural on the gable end but the place was really too small to do justice to what was on show.
So the move to the old railway station and warehouse complex on Liverpool road was a wonderful step forward. Here was an historic site with plenty of space to expand and develop. There are exhibitions on public health, the gas and electricty industries along with steam locomotives, textile machines and archive.
And this is one of the reasons why I return so often to the museum because at the heart of the place is the Liverpool Road railway station and the 1830 warehouse. These were built as part of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which had been constructed to transport goods to and from Liverpool more cheaply and more quickly.
The railway and these buildings were at the cutting edge of technology. No one had built such an ambitious railway before and the designers and engineers were working at the limits of what they knew. Much was copied from the knowledge of building canals, and many of the men employed on its construction would have also worked on the canal network which had crisscrossed Britain during the last half century.
But there were new demands. Not least was how you physically transported the goods along the iron railway. Very early on the plan to use static steam engines using metal cable was abandoned in favour of steam locomotives. And this led to the Rainhill Trials where interested parties were invited to submit their own locomotive to compete in a competition to see which was best suited to haul a number of wagons from Liverpool to Manchester. It was as if today NASA asked for companies to build a new spacecraft and test it at the further reaches of Venus with a plan to start an interstellar passenger service.
Not that the directors were at first keen to entertain a passenger service. One reluctantly conceded that they might just carry some, but it would be in open boxes and at night. Once the decision was taken to ferry people the obvious design choice was an adapted stage coach complete with luggage on the roof and an outside seat for the guard. But this was for their first class passengers, the rest travelled in open blue boxes.
And there were other ways that this first real railway line looked back into the past. The first warehouse was a direct copy from the canal warehouses, and even contained arches to allow wagons to be taken directly into the building. But unlike the canals where a barge could turn in the water, in the case of the 1830 warehouse each wagon had to be uncoupled and turned 90⁰ degrees on a turntable from the track before it could enter the warehouse.
In other ways they mixed the old with the new. The roof of the carriage shed where the trains came into the station was constructed of wooden beams and would have been familiar to anyone who lived or worked in a wooden building but the roof rested on cast iron pillars.
The museum has used these building with a degree of imagination and a keen eye on how they can enhance the exhibitions. And while in an early phase much damage was done to part of the 1830 warehouse, more recently the remainder has been restored with a keen sense of what the original was like.
For a full picture of the exhibitions and events visit http://www.mosi.org.uk/ or turn up to Liverpool Road.
Pictures; restored carriage circa 1837 restored by the Friends of the Museum and part of the carriage shed of the station from the collection of Andrew Simpson
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