STAFF at York's National Railway Museum were celebrating today after an eccentric train buff left it £500,000 in his will.

The money was part of ex-public schoolboy Charles Shorto's £5 million fortune in a bequest to ten charities.

The former railway engineer, of East Budleigh, Devon left public school to join the railways as a teenager and worked as an engineer on them for 40 years. He died, aged 91, in October.

The windfall was welcomed today by bosses at the NRM.

Museum manager Chris Allender said: "Obviously we are delighted with the news, which we actually heard through the press. We have not yet heard from the solicitors or family.

"The museum desperately needs funding and we could probably spend the money three times over and at the moment we are still coming to terms with the fact that we have been given it.

"We want to contact members of his family first to see if he had any specific wishes as to how the money should be spent at the museum otherwise we have several projects would like to use it for such as care of the collections."

The news comes only a week after £155,000 was donated to the museum by Railtrack for improving access for visitors with wheelchairs and pushchairs.

The gift was handed over at this year's White Rose Tourism Awards as the NRM received the Tourism For All award for its efforts to improve visitor access.

Railtrack's cash will pay for a new lift to the balcony gallery and cover the cost of the museum's recently installed automatic doors.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.