A £4.9m Lottery grant which could bring thousands of extra visitors to the North-East and pave the way for a new network of themed tourist attractions is due to be announced today.

Exciting new plans to open a £7.7m museum in the railway town of Shildon could bring major spin-off benefits to the whole region.

The Heritage Lottery Fund will confirm its massive contribution this morning, clearing the way for development to start later this year of the first ever offshoot of York's National Railway Museum (NRM).

By the time it opens in 2004, bosses aim to set up links with other major draws such as the award-winning Beamish Museum and Darlington's North Road centre to create an ambitious tourist trail of industrial attractions as good as any in the country.

The new Collections Centre, housing the NRM's reserve collection of engines and carriages, will be built by the National Museum of Science and Industry and managed by Sedgefield Borough Council.

As well as creating eight jobs, it could attract as many as 50,000 visitors a year.

It will house 60 engines and carriages ranging from coal trucks to five royal carriages in a huge glass building on an overgrown former marshalling yard next to the existing Timothy Hackworth Museum.

They include an experimental prototype of the ill-fated gas-powered "tilting train" - the Advanced Passenger Train from 1972.

The site chosen for the new museum is already steeped in railway history. In 1925, the world's first public steam-hauled train heralded in the railway age when it left Shildon to travel the 21 miles through Darlington to Stockton-on-Tees.

Phil Ball, the borough's head of leisure services, said yesterday: "We see it as a extension of the tourist infrastructure in the North-East."