Could try harder

Sadly, Sunday was not one of our finer excursions. It was cold, grey and miserable, so we thought we'd amuse M by going to look at some trains (Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat is still inordinately popular). We'd really enjoyed the National Railway Museum in York, so off we scampered to Locomotion, the National Railway Museum at Shildon.

Hey, it was free. How bad could it be?

Bad.

How to annoy your visitors:

• Have a museum full of engines/carriages etc etc to look at, but not one that you can clamber about on. Try constantly explaining that to a two-year-old - it's fun!
• Don't open the all-day visitor cafe until the end of March, but advertise its existence on all your leaflets. That'll really, really piss them off, especially if they arrive on a Sunday lunchtime expecting to get a nice cup of coffee and a bit of lunch.
• Have lots of interactive displays...but don't repair them. See two-year-old comment above.

We just weren't impressed. It's a museum for people who really really like trains, and want to go and see rolling stock SE9783242 so they can tick it off their list. There's really not a lot to do apart from wander round admiringly...and if you're not that fussed about the trains in the first place, then you'll get bored alarmingly quickly.

Sadly, lovely though Shildon may be, there didn't appear to be a lot else on offer on a dank Sunday in February either. So we came home and (a) had some food and (b) did some fingerpainting with purple, yellow and green paint. Which was far more fun.