Locomotion at Shildon celebrates its 20th anniversary

The £11.3m museum was built on what had once been the world’s largest marshalling yard, where much of south Durham’s coal output was collected for onward transmission.

The Shildon marshalling yard on September 2, 1964, by Ray GoadThe same view from the 1908 signal box taken by Ray Goad on September 1, 2003, as the railway museum takes shape. Pictures courtesy of the JW Armstrong TrustNo one, though, had told Mr Blair that he was actually three weeks late as the museum had been welcoming visitors since September 27, 2004.

Opening of Locomotion The National Railway Museum at Shildon on September 27, 2004

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Tony Blair opens Locomotion on October 22, 2004. Picture: John AskwithTo commemorate the 20th anniversary, Richard Barber, of the Friends of the National Railway Museum, is giving a talk in the Sunday School building on Saturday, October 26, at 10am, looking at how railway museums in Britain came about and at how Shildon has ended up with the largest undercover museum of railway vehicles in Europe. All are welcome.

That last claim to fame is because of the £8m New Hall which opened on May 24 this year.

Tony Blair opens the Shildon Locomotion Rail Museum by visiting the cab of the Flying ScotsmanSurprisingly, the New Hall is built on the site of one of the country’s largest banana ripening factories.

The New Hall at Shildon is on the site of a Geest banana ripening factoryThe banana was first imported in large quantities into Britain in 1901 from the West Indies by Edward Fyffe. They travelled green and unripe so they could not be damaged in transit, and once they landed in Britain, the ripening process began.

The railways carried the bananas from the docks in special banana vans, with steam heating pipes and the words “Steam Bananas” on the sides. Most towns on the railway network had their own, small banana ripening factories – Bishop Auckland, for instance, had one in Flintoff Street.

These factories were renowned not just for their exotic fruit but also their poisonous spiders which travelled over with the hands.

The Second World War ended the banana trade, but in peacetime, it restarted on an industrial scale.

In 1960, Geest began building a regional banana-ripening factory in Shildon beside the old marshalling yards.

In 1990, the factory handled 1.84m bananas every week which were delivered twice daily, by road, from the Windward Islands: Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia and St Vincent.

There were 23 ripening chambers in the factory, with the bananas in a slightly different state of ripeness in each chamber, thus preventing the creation of a glut of ripe bananas. Each chamber had 1,000 boxes of bananas in it, ripening with the help of the natural ethylene gas; each box had 80 bananas in it.

Banana-ripening in Shildon came to an end in 1996 when the factory closed. If it had consistently handled 1.84m bananas a week since it opened in 1961, we reckon in its 35 years of ripening, it produced 3,349m ripe bananas, although working out how many zeroes should be on the end of that number has, literally, sent us bananas.

Shildon is renowned for its wagon works, which were the largest in Europe at their peak in the 1950s when they produced 510 wagons a week, or 25,000 a year – yet it produced far more yellow bananas than it ever did coal wagons.

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