As some NERA members may know Darlington Borough Council are planning a significant revamp of the North Road station site that they own, in time for the S&DR 200-year commemoration in 2025. The revamp will involve building works and the Council plan to remove for safe keeping all the items in the site, including the contents of the Ken Hoole Study Centre (KHSC). STOP PRESS: we have been informed that from Tuesday 8th November 2022 the KHSC will only be open for appointments on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Museum staff will still be onsite on Tuesdays but the Study Centre will not be open.
The Study Centre will close fully on Thursday 1st December 2022.
The Council’s stated plans are to create a new archive centre on the North Road site (in the ex-Carriage Works building, currently used by the A1 Trust and NELPG) but this may not become available for some time perhaps not until 2026. In the meantime the Council may arrange some access to the KHSC collections, but details for this are currently unclear. So if members are expecting to visit the KHSC or access items in the NERA collections, it may be sensible to do this before end-November.
The Council’s plans don’t directly affect the main NERA archive (housed elsewhere on the North Road site). However indirectly they do, as we make our archive collection items available by transfer to the KHSC. We are endeavouring to digitise most of the NERA collections, but there is still a lot of items yet to be made available on the NERA website (in My Digital Archive). So most of the NERA archives will remain available after KHSC closes. However some of the NERA collections are held in the KHSC so, for any items located there that are not yet available on the website, we may lose access for several years.
As far as we know, the revamp doesn’t affect the station used by Northern Rail trains (Darlington-Bishop Auckland, etc).