FUNDING SECURED FOR NEW MUTUAL IMPROVEMENT CLASSROOM
Delighted to announce vital funding from North Yorkshire Council’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund, enabling us to build a new Mutual Improvement Classroom (MIC) at Grosmont Motive Power Depot. It will be used to train the railway’s next generation of heritage locomotive drivers, firemen and cleaners.
It will be the last surviving railway MIC in the world when it is completed by March 2025, and will replace the previous MIC at NYMR, which closed in January 2023.
The total project cost is £600,000 and, thanks to Peter Best, a gifted donation of £250,000 has enabled the project to come to life. Peter Best, a former NYMR PLC chairman, was recently awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for his services to steam and heritage railways. The 69-year-old has bought and restored a total of 11 locomotives with his own money. He says that seeing young people on a train hauled by one of his locomotives gives him “huge pleasure and pride".
The new MIC at NYMR will house components from numerous models of locomotives. Most training tools in the collection are priceless, having been inherited or donated from long-lost MICs over time. The facility will also house over 100 technical books on all locomotive matters. Some of these books are over 150 years old, and are used in conjunction with IT equipment to enable the NYMR to present classes globally.
Mutual Improvement Classes (MICs) originate from the early days of railways. As enginemen became more experienced, they would give up their time to educate colleagues who were rising through the grades on the footplate, starting as Engine Cleaners before progressing to Firemen and to Driver.
To find out more about the project and see images and a floorplan of the development, visit https://nymr.link/new-mic
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