Thousands of previously unseen national treasures will be accessible for the first time, as part of a new £3.5 million project at the National Railway Museum (NRM) called Search Engine.

With the help of a £995,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the museum plans to throw open its vast archive of the largest and richest collection of railway-related library, archive and image collections in the world, which have previously been hidden away in locked basements underneath the NRM.

The project will create a new public archive centre on the NRM's Great Hall Balcony, where anyone visiting the museum will be able to drop in and have their questions answered directly from the museum's archives without making an appointment.

Among the thousands of priceless items that will be made fully accessible for the first time is the key eyewitness account of the birth of the modern railways - the Rainhill Locomotive Trials of 1829, won by George Stephenson's Rocket.

As one of three judges of the trials, John Rastrick, a locomotive builder and engineer himself, was the key expert witness at this landmark event. He kept a notebook, now held in the NRM's archives, containing his detailed observations on the competing locomotives.

The NRM archive holds 1.5 million photographic negatives, one million engineering drawings, 9,000 railway posters, 350,000 railway tickets, 200 works of art, 2,500 items of heraldry, 2,000 oral history and sound recordings, and over 3km of letters, reports and railway papers.

Updated: 10:32 Monday, December 05, 2005