STEAM: 20 YEARS OF A MODERN SWINDON SUCCESS
In late 1998, a few months before the first issue of Heritage Railway appeared, I attended a Swindon Borough Council press conference to announce what seemed a very ambitious plan – to turn part of Isambard Kingdon Brunel’s Swindon Works into a museum to celebrate the magnificence of the Great Western Railway which he engineered.
The magnitude of such a development would give the great railway town that sprang up around the works a venue to rival the Brunel-themed attraction at Bristol, including the SS Great Britain, it was hoped.
Legend has it that in 1841, when Brunel and his superintendent Daniel Gooch were seeking to build a locomotive repair workshop around the midway point of the Paddington
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