THIS promenade production — the untold story of York’s self-styled Railway King George Hudson — is nothing if not logistically impressive in bringing together 200 community actors and a 40-strong choir under the aegis of the York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre and the National Railway Museum.

Its first act sees the audience divided into six groups as they walk around the museum to watch a series of vignettes.

We eavesdrop on the family of a near-destitute railway driver, witness two brothers get swept up in the promise of a paper fortune by investing in the Great North East railway line and watch Mrs Hudson (Rosy Rowley) struggle to fit into polite society with a series of comic malapropisms — “You are the very apothecary of manhood,” she tells her husband at one point.

Each scene builds up a wider picture of Hudson (George Costigan), who rose from a draper’s counter to the height of Victorian society through a series of shady business speculations.

He bought up the competition, cut wages and lowered safety standards, to the disgust of nemesis George Leeman (Rory Mulvihill) and erstwhile financial partner George Stephenson (Ian Giles).

The story threads and characters are woven into a straight narrative in the second half, which sees the action move into the purpose-built Signal Box theatre, where writers Mike Kenny and Bridget Foreman entwine the fading fortunes of Hudson with those of Albert Jenkins (Joe Osborne), a train driver who’s losing his sight.

It’s perhaps inevitable that after the intimate encounters of the first act — irrespective of the timings being slightly out on occasion and noise bleed during some scenes — the second half feels slightly overlong.

Yet there’s a contagious enthusiasm to this community production and a sense of order being restored.

Hudson might not have a statue or tea towel to rival Stephenson’s — as he complains at the start of the play — but his role in shaping the country’s rail network is finally recognised with this ambitious enterprise.

Runs until July 11, box office: nrm.org.uk

Review by Susan Darlington