MUSEUMS, galleries and just about everything else is closed down for the time being, while we weather this coronavirus pandemic.

Many have adapted by offering virtual museum tours or other online services - like the York Museums Trust's 'Object of the week' in The Press.

Let it never be said that we at Yesterday Once More don't do our bit, however.

Here's our own photographic tour of some favourite moments from York museums and festivals in times past. Some of these museums here - such as the Friargate wax Museum, sadly - have long since gone. Others are still with us, and will be re-opening once we get through the pandemic.

We hope our gallery will remind you of what you are missing - and help ensure that, once they do re-open, we don't take these wonderful treasures for granted...

Our photos show:

1. The Dominion of Canada at the York shed (now the National Railway Museum) in 1958 with Robin Gray and his fellow members of the Riley Technical High School Railway Society from Hull. The locomotive, which was in its BR green livery, was waiting to take the Plymouth-Edinburgh express train to Edinburgh. The Dominion was an LNER Class A4 steam locomotive built to the same design by Sir Nigel Gresley as the more famous Mallard.

2. The Prince and Princess of Wales at the National Railway Museum on their first visit to York together on November 12, 1981. The museum had been opened six years earlier, in 1975, by Prince Charles' father, the Duke of Edinburgh

3. Gemma Sneyd of the National Railway Museum with locomotives The Duchess of Hamilton and Mallard on the turntable together in the Great Hall. We love the contrast in sizes between woman and machine...

4. Archaeologists Richard Hall, left, and Peter Addyman, pictured on the site of the old Craven factory in Coppergate in 1976, before they began the Viking dig which led to the founding of the Jorvik centre

5. Prince Charles enjoying a time car ride with Dr Peter Addyman when formally opening the new Jorvik Viking Centre (later known just as Jorvik) in 1984. It is easy to forget today what a sensation the museum caused at the time. Journalists from as far afield had been given exclusive previews ahead of the official open on April 14, and had written rave reviews. "Uncannily life-like figures bargain, argue, sing and gossip in the market place and sit in the homes and workshops exhaustively copied from the remains of the originals," wrote one, Ian Cundall of the Evening Press's sister newspaper The Northern Echo. "It even smells realistic – rotting rubbish putrifies in the gutter, the fragrance of wood smoke fills the air and the fishmonger's stock of herring and eel gives off its unmistakeable aroma."

Small wonder, then, that when it opened there were huge queues – at one point a line up to 100 yards long snaked around the 'new' Coppergate shopping centre...

6. Not quite such a sensation as the Jorvik Viking Centre, perhaps, but still great fun in its own way, was the Friargate Wax Museum, seen here on March 13, 1984, just a month before Jorvik's official opening. In our picture, staff member Janet Bowens was giving the Queen, Princess Anne and Princess Diana the 'hairdryer treatment'. Don't ask us why...

7. And finally, one of our favourite local museum photos of all was taken the day Prince Philip had a run-in with a T Rex at the Yorkshire Museum. Happily, he lived to yell the tale...

Stephen Lewis