VIRGIN Trains East Coast has today named a loco National Railway Museum to mark its 40th anniversary - helped by three museum volunteers with almost 120 years' service between them.

David Eastoe, Peter Brumby and Rob Tibbits blew out the candles on a specially designed cake re-creating the look of the specially liveried locomotive, which was given its new name in a ceremony at York Railway Station after pulling in from London Kings Cross.

The train firm's managing director David Horne said the museum had helped put York on the tourism map over the past four decades, such that seven million visitors now came to the city each year - many by train - and tourism now supported 19,000 York jobs.

He said the loco had been named after the museum once before, in 1985, to mark the NRM's 10th anniversary.

The revived name will stay with the engine until it is replaced in a few years by a new generation of locos which are currently being built for Virgin in the north-east.

Museum director Paul Kirkman said the NRM had expanded hugely over the four decades and was set to become even bigger and better in future by being at the heart of the massive York Central redevelopment plans for land behind the station.

The volunteers told how they worked at the museum simply because they loved trains, and planned to continue there as part of an army of 200 volunteers for the foreseeable future.

Mr Brumby, 71, from near Hull, said he used to come trainspotting to York as a boy in the 1950s and he had been delighted when it was announced in the early 1970s that a new national railway museum was to be based in the city.

Mr Tibbitts, 70, from the Boroughbridge Road area of York, said he was one of a group of volunteers who worked on the Duchess of Hamilton, going there about once a week to polish and clean the iconic loco.