THE spacecraft which carried British astronaut Tim Peake into space is to touch down in the region as part of a nationwide tour.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-19M capsule will be on display at Locomotion in Shildon, County Durham from November for three months before moving onto the National Railway Museum in York in January. The museums have been chosen as two of only eight across the country to host the special exhibition.

The astronaut himself was in York last night talking to nearly 1,000 people about the tour and his experiences as the first British European Space Agency astronaut to visit the space station.

The tour has been created by the Science Museum Group which acquired the Soyuz spacecraft last year and technology giants Samsung.

Tim Peake spent six months orbiting the earth, carrying out experiments and even walking in space before being brought back in June 2016 in the Soyuz craft .