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!)

 

Good morning all,


A small and long overdue update from Mountsorrel, quite a lot has been happing around site and we are coming to the closing stages of a couple of important projects for us.

We have as far as the large structures and groundworks are concerned, completed our project to rebuild the Soar Lane lift bridge. The final task for our hard working volunteers was to finish the granite sets on the approaches. I think the final results looks fantastic, a million miles away from the deteriorating structures that once stood at Snibston and Abbey Lane. It is now rail connected and passing wagons over it will occasionally form part of our shunting demonstrations. There is still some fine tuning to be done with the lifting mechanism but nothing major. When I first cataloged all of the components we were given for the initial engineering review, I had my doubts that we would be able to make a functioning bridge using the original material. I very pleased to see the bridge functioning, and in the end I think it was only 1 bracket and 1 shaft that were beyond saving.



There are still a number of small jobs to complete in the adjoining museum which is housing some display boards to explain the history of the bridge, a 5 inch gauge working model, a diorama of the area surrounding the bridge and the remaining historical material that was too worn to be reused in the reconstruction. I think there will be an official opening at some point, which will be one of the key features of our ‘Railway 200’ event. It has made it into the local news (print and online) as well, scoring us some nice publicity. https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/...ortant-leicestershire-railway-bridge-10335493

In other exciting news for us that I only recently became aware of, the Heritage Center is now the owners of the Ruston 48DS which has been on a rolling 1-year load to us from Leicester Council Museums following the closure of Snibston Discovery Park.



The loan agreement had hindered us from carrying out anything other than essential maintenance and servicing to the loco. There are a number of tasks we have wanted to do to improve the long term reliability of the loco and start to repair some of the corrosion to the sheet metal work. The roof and the lower areas on the cab sides are particularly suspect and we're looking forward to being able to spend some time showing some love to our reliable little shunter.

The ticket cupboard from John O'Gaunt station (kindly donated by Johann and the Ipswich Transport Museum) has now been installed in the Heritage Center Museum, along with an accompanying display explaining it's purpose and connection to the local area.

 

That's good news about the Ruston being transferred to the Heritage Centre as I assumed its condition was due to its ownership by a third party!
You can't beat having full ownership of everything that you have in your Museum - something we at the ITM (and its predecessors) decided over 55 years ago. We do still take in loaned items occasionally, but only when they are of great local significance that we are unlikely to get examples of ourselves.

 

Thanks for the comprehensive update Ricky. There is so much to see and do on the branch line and in the Heritage centre. Well Done to Steve Cramp and the team.