STUART Nichols has only been on the footplate of the Darlington Railway Centre and Museum for less than a year, but already there have been a lot of changes.

Most notably, paying visitors have increased 28 per cent and a major redevelopment scheme has been launched with the aim of turning the centre into a major tourism site and the base of a World Heritage Site bid.

In eight weeks' time, a bid will be made by Darlington Borough Council, which runs the site, for the first £500,000 of about £3m of Heritage Lottery money needed for the five-year project.

Mr Nichols, the man behind the move to ask National Lottery chiefs to dig deep, is used to some digging of his own, having worked on his first archaeological site at the age of 15, while still a schoolboy in Manchester.

Now 48, he has travelled around the country working on some of the most important digs and lecturing to countless students - similar to film director Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones character, minus the whip and hat.

"I started off as an archaeologist working for Manchester University, although I had done a lot of excavation work previously," said Mr Nichols, whose first dig was the amphitheatre, in Cheshire, in 1968.

Despite training as an engineer, he later studied archaeology, and most of his work in that field has been carried out for universities.

For many years, he worked on Cheshire's Tatton Park excavations, unveiling a medieval village and mesolithic hunter site in the 1980s.

In Birmingham, Mr Nichols excavated Hobs Moat, an "evil" site and probably the largest moat site in the country.

His role in Darlington was also preceded as head of the Chester Muesum Service, where he was responsible for increasing business services.

Since arriving in the North-East, he has achieved much - and hopes to do much more before the museum redevelopment is completed.

Coming from a non-railway background, he believes, has given him an advantage.

"That is probably why they appointed me to come, because I can see it with a more critical eye. I think trains are boring, it is the people who made them that are interesting," he said.

Part of the redevelopment will be to add a social history side of the museum.

"We have made quite a lot of changes. We have put temporary exhibition galleries in, we have opened up the Victorian urinals, which were built in the 1870s, which are one of only two of their kind in the world, the others being in Paris," he said.

Visitors from Darlington itself have helped the massive visitor increase.

"The people that tend to be coming, the vast majority of that build-up are people from Darlington, who have not been before," he said.

"We have had a fantastic response from people of Darlington. It is very important that we get local people in.