First Tyne and Wear Metro car to become museum exhibit

Metro carriage number 4001 will be moved to the Stephenson Railway Museum in North Tyneside

The first Tyne and Wear Metro car is to swap its life on the tracks for a museum in North Shields.

After operating for 43 years, the train is among the Metro's ageing fleet which is being replaced with new stock later this year.

Car number 4001 was the Metro prototype and the first to travel on the Sunderland line in April 2002.

Once at the Stephenson Railway Museum, it will help "tell the story of the Metro", bosses said.

Over the coming months the current fleet will be phased out and replaced with 46 Swiss-built trains, meaning some of the existing stock will be scrapped.

The new trains are expected to start on the Metro network in the autumn

Geoff Woodward, museums manager at Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, said 4001 is "coming home to Stephenson Railway".

The museum is built on the site of Metro's former test track, where the train was first delivered in 1975, ahead of the network's opening in 1980.

"The site was the test track for a number of years and they tested out the Metro service and rolling stock with people from the local community," Mr Woodward said.

The car will sit on the museum's new section of track, but will be unable to run as the infrastructure is not compatible, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

In the future the museum intends to secure funding for a building to accommodate the car and other Metro material to tell the story of the light railway system.

Metro operator Nexus said it was "only right" that some of the original trains are preserved.

It admitted the existing fleet had become "an increasing maintenance challenge" but said they still had a heritage value.