Mountsorrel Heritage Centre

The bridge has continued to make progress as time and money has allowed over the winter and we have reached quite an exciting milestone over the last two weekends. For the first time we think since 1957, the bridge is operational, rail connected and a rail vehicle has travelled over it. . So far it's just our Permaquip ballast trolley, but an exciting glance in the direction of things to come! To get to this point, over winter the abutment walls have been built and filled and the preparation of the bridge museum has continued inside the winding house.

Aside from that, there has been a lot of hard work over the last few weeks lifting 3 of the points in the yard and packing in 40 tonnes of fresh ballast. This has lifted the noticeable dip that was present between two of them and should simplify some of the operations in our shunting demonstrations. Second photo courtesy of Steve Cramp. Steam effects courtesy of Fowler traction engine; 'Pops'.

 

Great work by the team in getting so much into such a tight space!

 

Latest exhibit to arrive is this rather nice 5" gauge working model of the Stephenson lift bridge which will be part of the display in the "winding house" museum building..........



It will be joined later by an OO scale model of the area around the lift bridge at its original Leicester location.

This LNER Austin lorry was also present there on Saturday................



It's apparently recently been puchased by someone local and is being stored there for the time being. It obviously was restored at some stage but needds a bit of work to get it back into a fit state (the photo was taken from the better viewpoint - the rear end has deteriorated considerably!)