Leeds Industrial Museum will use the scans to help visitors understand the inner-workings of the 1811 model.
New scans of the world’s oldest model locomotive have allowed for a look inside the object for the first time in more than 200 years.
Leeds Industrial Museum’s model train, originally made for the engineer Matthew Murray in 1811, underwent a detailed CT X-Ray survey using equipment at the University of Leeds.
It is hoped the images of the model’s interior can now illustrate to museum visitors how it worked.
“Short of cutting open the model, which we wouldn’t ever do, we’d never have got to see its inner workings in quite this way,” said John McGoldrick, Leeds Museums and Galleries’ curator of industrial history, which operates Leeds Industrial Museum.
“Now, not only are we examining a piece of engineering history, we’re also getting a unique and unprecedented insight into the mind of one of the world’s great inventors.
“Thanks to these remarkable scans, we can now explore for the first time since 1811 how the model worked, and the extraordinary ingenuity and intricacy which went into its creation.”
Leeds Museums and Galleries teamed up with Dr Michael Bailey, an early railway historian and archaeologist of early locomotive technology, Dr Alice Macente from the University of Leeds School of Civil Engineering and Dr Sam Allshorn from the School of Earth and Environment on the project.
The scans were carried out at Wolfson Multiphase Flow Laboratory in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.
Dr Bailey will now be producing a detailed historical account of the model together with an assessment of its design and components.
Funding for the project came through the Leeds Cultural Institute’s Collections Research Fund, a collaboration between academics at the University of Leeds and Leeds Museums and Galleries.
