The National Railway Museum Podcast
Jun 7, 2026 · 44 min · 10 segments
On this episode of the National Railway Museum Podcast, Oli lends his expertise from his brief stint in CSI: York and talks with Paul Bickley, curator of the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard. Our…
Paul BickleyGuest
Oli BettsHost
Hello and welcome to the National Railroad Museum podcast where we dive into some of the more complicated and fascinating stories in our collection with an expert guest who can help us explore all different aspects of that.
I'm the current curator of the Crime Museum, which is based at New Scotland Yard.
I focus on educating young police officers, looking at how crimes were solved in the past.
I was a police officer for 31 years, so I've got a lot of police background, including nine years working on the Flying Squad, so investigating armed robbery.
But I think the other thing we wanted to point out is that we're really lucky to have you because this is not a museum that's open to the public, is it? This is a closed museum.
We don't invite the public, mainly because it is used for training, so we haven't got the capacity yet.
But out of respect for the victims and the family members, we don't involve the public as well.
We have a drugs license, which is conditional, but it's not open to the public.
I mean it's such a fascinating collection and one of the things that you're here to well the thing you're here to talk to us today about is this long relationship that the railways have with with crime and with policing and we're going to do I think through two key cases that are almost 100 years apart we were talking just how so close so close the first of these happens in 1864 so We're not right at the start of the railway age but it's still quite a new technology and one of the key things I suppose we'll see in the case is that both the public and the police are still trying to find their way around how you police this technology and the new space is created by it.
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Hello and welcome to the National Railroad Museum podcast where we dive into some of the more complicated and fascinating stories in our collection with an expert guest who can help us explore all different aspects of that.
I'm the current curator of the Crime Museum, which is based at New Scotland Yard.
I focus on educating young police officers, looking at how crimes were solved in the past.
I was a police officer for 31 years, so I've got a lot of police background, including nine years working on the Flying Squad, so investigating armed robbery.
But I think the other thing we wanted to point out is that we're really lucky to have you because this is not a museum that's open to the public, is it? This is a closed museum.
We don't invite the public, mainly because it is used for training, so we haven't got the capacity yet.
But out of respect for the victims and the family members, we don't involve the public as well.
We have a drugs license, which is conditional, but it's not open to the public.
I mean it's such a fascinating collection and one of the things that you're here to well the thing you're here to talk to us today about is this long relationship that the railways have with with crime and with policing and we're going to do I think through two key cases that are almost 100 years apart we were talking just how so close so close the first of these happens in 1864 so We're not right at the start of the railway age but it's still quite a new technology and one of the key things I suppose we'll see in the case is that both the public and the police are still trying to find their way around how you police this technology and the new space is created by it.
