Railway museums figure amongst the oldest industrial museums in Europe, often founded by railway companies themselves with the aim of preserving their history and promoting a good public image. In many countries, campaigns to save railway heritage, especially from the steam era, were a key stimulus in the valuation of industry's historical legacy.
The large national railway companies like RENFE, Deutsches Bahn, SNCF and British Rail, created through the nationalisation of former private companies in the first half of the 20 th century, collaborated with the national museums in their respective countries in the task of preserving historical, industrial property, some of them participating directly in the management of the museums.
In 1991 the European Council of Ministers changed this comfortable situation with European Directive 91/440 concerning railway transport and ‘interoperability'. The aim was to break up the old state monopolies and promote the movement of trains across European borders. The strategy was to separate the management of the infrastructure – the rail network, signalling and stations – from the operation of passenger and freight services.

Those places where the changes were introduced saw the increased participation of private companies with new management structures and transparent accounting, commercial pressures and private shareholders that made it difficult to maintain the support and participation the former state companies had given to the national railway museums.
In this new climate, the museums have been looking for new legal and administrative formulas in order to maintain their activities and collections and identify historical material before it is abandoned. In 2003 the Fundación Ferroviaria Española (Spanish Railway Foundation) commissioned a study into the effects of 91/440 on the protection of railway heritage and train museums in Europe in order to define a strategy for the Spanish national museums in Madrid and Vilanova i la Geltrú in the face of reforms to RENFE, the state monopoly which comes to an end in 2009.
The examination of what has happened since 1991 in four European countries (France, Great Britain, Germany and Italy) with a long railway tradition and equipped with powerful railway museums, has revealed two tendencies in the development of these museums: the first, a separation between the operational and commercial heritage of the firms that operated the network and trains, and the second (in part as a result of that separation), a number of different solutions with respect to the financing and management of the museums. In France and Great Britain the restructuring of the rail network took into account the management of railway heritage, either through specialist teams for each section as happened at SNCF or the establishment of a specific committee like the Railway Heritage Committee (RHC), in the case of Britain. By contrast, in Germany and Italy, the preservation of this heritage does not enjoy any formal obligation and depends instead on the goodwill of enthusiastic workers, former employees and specialists that collaborate with museums in Germany; or on projects at the heart of which are railway companies who have no formal responsibility for them, as is the case in Italy.
Now it remains to be seen whether Spain's later enforcement of the liberalisation of the railway market has allowed us to learn from the experience of neighbouring countries. The priorities are to find a secure, legal mechanism for identifying important material before it is abandoned and offering it to the museums, and a suitable, stable financial regime for the museums that will allow the collections to continue preserving and displaying railway heritage.

(For an up-to-date summary of the development of the European rail system, see http://arcatlantique.org/pdf/es_pres_ffcc_liberalizacion_v001_es.pdf )

'The Preservation and Management of Rail Heritage in Europe ', Spanish Railway Foundation, 2003.