STAFF at the National Railway Museum celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Search Engine archive with a 100-year-old cake,
The cake was baked from an original recipe that appropriately belonged to railway pioneer George Stephenson.
Found inside Stephenson’s Household Book dating from the 1840s, the hand-written recipe for Cumberland cake was one of several cake recipes, suggesting George had something of a sweet tooth.
The book also included instructions for making "English Champagne", fine ales and other less appealing items such as "calf foot gilly".
The book is one of many items to be added to the York museum's collection since Search Engine opened, which now includes more than 1,000 paintings, 2,350 prints and drawings and 1.75m photographs.
Launched in 2008 at a cost of £4m Search Engine was a new project to open up access to the museum’s archive collection. Since opening more than 350,000 people have used the facility.
The collection covers everything from 11,000 railway travel posters advertising destinations from Iona to Ilfracombe, to numerous railway archives – one civil defence record even describes plans to keep the railways running during a nuclear attack.
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