East Anglia Transport Museum


The East Anglia Transport Museum is an open-air transport museum, with numerous historic public transport vehicles. It is located in Carlton Colville a suburb of Lowestoft, Suffolk. It is the only museum in the country where visitors can ride on buses, trams and trolleybuses, as well as a narrow-gauge railway.

What the Museum offers

The museum has many exhibits ranging from a 1904 Lowestoft Corporation tram to a 1985 Sinclair C5. Tram rides are available on a route passing the museum's trolleybus depot and up to a terminus at Woodside. Originally, the trolleybus route extended as far as the trolleybus depot where passengers could change for a ride on the museum's 2 ft gauge railway to Chapel Road, or they could stay on the trolleybus whilst it performed a 3-point turn and returned to the museum entrance via the same route.
12 July 2008 marked Britain's first trolleybus extension for many decades through the creation of a loop along the Back Road, linking in with the existing overhead wiring near to the museum's entrance. This follows the tarmacadaming of the Back Road, which previously had been a muddy field, and the renaming of this to Herting Street - in honour of the gentleman whose generous donation made these works possible.
Exhibits include the last trolleybus to operate under its own power in London, No. 1521, one of a batch of 150 L3 class vehicles built on chassis made by Associated Equipment Company and Metro Cammell Weymann in 1939-40. When it entered Fulwell Depot in the evening of 8 May 1962, it marked the end of what had been the world's largest trolleybus network.

History

The museum was founded on its present site at Carlton Colville in 1965, following the rescue in 1962 by four enthusiasts of the body of an old Lowestoft tram, which had been used for a number of years as a summerhouse. The site was formerly a meadow, donated by the founder and first chairman of the Museum Society. The first buildings on the site were constructed in 1966, but development work on the site took a number of years to complete, and the museum first opened to the public on 28 May 1972. Full tram and trolleybus operations began in 1981, following the construction of a suitable roadway.
The Museum's narrow gauge railway, known as the East Suffolk Light Railway, opened in 1973. It was some long, running along the northern edge of the site, and the -gauge track was constructed from materials obtained from a sand quarry at Leziate, from Canvey Island and from the Southwold Railway. Signals were obtained from several locations in the vicinity. The museum also owns a van body which once ran on the Southwold Railway.
In 2016, the museum acquired some land adjacent to the main site, and then applied to Waveney District Council to allow them to extend the museum site. The Council decided that such a move would be beneficial to the region, as the museum injected some £450,000 into the local economy in 2016, and voted to grant planning permission unanimously. The estimated cost for the development is one million pounds, which should see the tramway, the trolleybus route and the narrow gauge railway lengthened, and the total area of the site almost doubling. Plans include the construction of a new exhibition hall devoted to Eastern Coach Works, a major builder of bus and train bodywork, which was located in nearby Lowestoft, until its closure in 1987. The plans provided for two new depots to be built, one for trams and the other for trolleybuses. At the time of the application, some 20 vehicles were kept in store at Ellough near Beccles, and the museum aimed to move all of them to the Sutton Colville site, so that they could be seen by the public more easily.
The first of the transport systems to be extended was the East Suffolk Light Railway, which originally terminated near the woodland tramway. Progress was blocked by a tramway siding, and one of the early jobs was to construct a flat crossing to allow the trains to pass over the tramway.

Exhibits

Trams

There are four locomotives which operate on the East Suffolk Light Railway. All of them have four-wheel chassis, with diesel engines and mechanical transmission. One was made by Ruston and Hornsby of Lincoln and three were made by Motor Rail of Bedford. The frames of a fourth Motor Rail locomotive were used to form the chassis of a brakevan.
Fleet numbersNameTypeManufacturerMakers No.Built
2Aldburgh4wDMMotor Rail59121934
4Leiston4wDMRuston & Hornsby1776041936
No.5Orfordness4wDMMotor Rail222111964
No.6Thorpness4wDMMotor Rail222091964

Gallery