Whistle Stop tour comes to town
A touring exhibition, showcasing Stockton and Darlington Railway's (S&DR) momentous history, is steaming into town as part of the celebrations of the first passenger railway.
Whistle Stop, presented by the S&DR200 Festival, gives visitors the chance to step back 200 years in time to see important documents and images from the birth of the modern railway. The exhibition is an introduction to the very start of the S&DR story
The documents have been brought together from archives across the UK and include engineer drawings and rarely seen maps, as well as cultural paintings, poems and cartoons depicting the adventurous and strange inventions of the age!
The free exhibition runs from Saturday 14 June to Thursday 24 July at Darlington library, Crown Street.
Niccy Hallifax, S&DR200 festival directors, said: “This touring exhibition has already delighted visitors in Durham and Stockton-on-Tees libraries and I hope Darlington residents will come along and see this impressive collection of artefacts from around the country. The Whistle Stop is a fascinating insight into the birth and subsequent development of the modern railway into what we see today.”
The exhibition will move on to Shildon Library (31 July- 20 August) before returning to Darlington to the Friends Community Hub on Skinnergate (25 August- 3 September) and Locomotion, Shildon, (6 September- 4 October)
Visitors to Darlington library can also see some of the peg dolls made for A Memory of a Journey , a mass-participation story-telling art project taking place across Tees Valley and County Durham which sees community groups and residents decorate peg dolls representing their favourite train journey. They will be showcased in an exhibition at Preston Park Museum in the summer.
The nine-month S&DR200 Festival is celebrating the historic first journey on the Stockton and Darlington Railway with a series of impressive free large-scale outdoor spectacles, events, exhibitions and new art commissions in the public spaces, libraries and world-class museums of Tees Valley and County Durham until November.
Keep on track with how to get involved via our social media channels, the Enjoy Darlington website www.enjoydarlington.co.uk and the S&DR200 website www.sdr200.co.uk