h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A87743866 - contributions made so far can be seen there, but please keep them coming.

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Ooops. Thank you for correcting that the-jon-m, Liverpool Street and Road are quite different places.

Money. Budgets. How much it costs you the visitor.

Entrance to the museum itself is free and there are plenty of things to see for free but there are charges for some things.
The steam train ride cost £2.00 and the Dr Who Exhibition was £6.50 when that was showing and current charges in 2012 were all less than that.

There is a gift shop selling souvenirs of science and industry type things and also the usual gift shop things such as key rings with the most popular current names for children in the UK printed on them. 2012 is the UK London Olympics and the UK Queen's Diamond Jubileee they also had Olympic souvenirs and Union Jack printed things for sale.

That's great – thank you for all your contributions and keep them coming!

At the moment this articles' introduction is
'The Museum of Science & Industry consists of five listed buildings:'
While this is nice to know, it isn't the most exciting opening sentence – surely we can do better? I would like a new, exciting opening paragraph. A simply stirring & stimulating sentence at the start that screams 'read this article'. So can you help me and make some suggestions?

I look forward to reading your ideas.

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Near the main entrance to the museum is a working replica of the worlds first electronic stored program computer, the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine also called Baby.
This was a computer built using valves and cathode ray tubes for storage. The cameras people were using to take photos of the computer display will have more processing power in a much smaller size.

Phil's Post 16 has a nice line as a way of opening. You could also ad that MOSI smells. It smells of hot coal, and hot steam and hot iron. It's great.

Getting there: It is really very very easy to find from the M6, which is how I assume everybody approaches Manchester by car from the north or south? You get of the motorway at junction 19, go down the A556 which turns into the A56 and MOSI's Liverpool Road is on the left soon after you see Deansgate rail station on your right. If you have gone as far as St Peter's Road, you have gone too far and will be sucked into Manchester's one way system.

Parking: lots of car parks around and about. Not free, but hey it is the centre of Manchester. Which brings us to:

Location: It really is practically in the centre. There should be no excuses for not going if you are ever visiting the city.

I wonder if we could get Candi's son to give us the small child's perspective?

Not just Candi's boy but Mag's also and if Galaxy Babe got some thoughts from her visiting students?

Thank you for those contributions and suggestions – younger persons' perspectives would certainly provide an insightful contribution to the article. I'll see if I can get any comments.

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I must finally remember to write something about the buildings for you... so far I can only say most of them are made from bricks.

No-one else had mentioned that little detail about bricks, so I've added it to the article! It only goes to prove that every contribution, large or small, plays its part.

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The building with the aircrafts was a steel or iron construction kind of cross-shaped as far as I remember, with big windows on all ends and part of the roof was (rather dirty) glass
the iron/steel pillars had the shapes of classical collumns and the ornaments were painted in different colors

That building was used to be the Lower Campfield Market Hall, I assume the similar one up the road was the upper campfield and was built in the 1870s. It became the City Exhibition Hall around the turn of the twentieth century. It became the Air and Space museam in 1983 and joined MOSI two years later

In the Air and Space Hall I perambulated half way round the hall at ground level, then ascended to the balcony and continued. From this vantage point I was brought up short by the tiny horror of the kamikaze rocket plane below me. The brutal honesty of the thing was ghastly: it looked so clearly like what it was: a missile with space for a living guidance system in the shape of one cramped and presumably terrified pilot. Douglas Adams' words came to me as so often before, "For goodness' sake mankind!" And yet it's a brilliant solution. Chilling, revolting and brilliant.

The kamikaze rocket plane was dwarfed by one of the tail fins of a vast British plane from the cold war which could stay airborne for 24 hours and contained bunk beds for its crew. This vertiginous juxtaposition was a masterstroke of arrangement on the part of the museum and, dizzied with scale and repulsion, I tottered past some jolly old push-bikes and off to the pub.

I'm very impressed with how this article is progressing and expect to be able to put it into Peer Review next week!

As there were 51 people at the meet-up on Saturday I assumed that maybe 10 only turned up in the evening, maybe a dozen stayed in the pub, so possibly 30 people went to the museum. I felt that if half of the remainder, about 15 researchers, contributed to this article we'd be doing really well and so far 18 researchers have got involved! Which is fantastic - but wouldn't it be great if that number could rise to the 20s?

Is there anything in the article that you feel should be mentioned more, or that we've left out? Did anyone go to the 4D Theatre or into the Planetarium? Keep your contributions coming in!

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Do we know which bits of MOSI are part of the fixtures and fittings and which are furniture.

I presume the steam train won't be going anywhere apart from Liverpool Road to Ordsall Lane and back again but some of the displays might be temporary like the Dr Who one was? Are all the ones memtioned in the article likely to stay for a good while.

Everything mentioned in the article so far are the permanent exhibitions. If anyone went into the temporary galleries, we'd love to hear from you.

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The steam train is semi-perminent ... it is based there as is the planet replica (the other regualr steamer) but both sometimes get hired out for events.

Although it is connected to the mainline, a lorry tends to taken them away. None of the other steam locos can be used ... the South African is narrow gauge, the Indian / pakistani is broad gauge, the demo one is choped in half and the novelty replica keeps falling over.

The 2 diesel shunters that sit out are quite new, they only arrived a couple of months ago. The black one (class 02) was in Chesterfield (Barrow Hill) until last year and not sure where the blue one (class 06) came from.

The things you people know...

I've spent a lot of time in the power hall of the museum ... and also was in Barrow hill last autumn so saw the shunter there.




also writing a few entries on diesel locos so researched the shunters

You weren't planning on writing an article on the Museum of Science & Industry, were you, if you've been spending a lot of time there?
If so, then there's no reason why, after this general article about the museum, a more detailed one focussing on, for example, the Power Hall and engines could not be written. I would hate to feel that I've derailed anyone else's ideas for something to write about.

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