East Suffolk Light Railway’s extension is up and running
THE East Anglian Transport Museum has extended its 2ft gauge line.
The museum at Carlton Colville, near Lowestoft, was founded on a greenfield site at its current location in 1965.
By 1973, the East Suffolk Light Railway had been created and ran along the northern edge of the site.
In 2016, the museum purchased the adjacent five-acre field to the west with a view to expansion. Formerly farmland, this field was then subject to planning permission granted in a unanimous vote by Waveney District Council.
The long-term plan is to expand the museum's trolleybus route, the standard gauge tramway and the 2ft gauge line, with interchange facilities being located in the south west corner of the field.
Work started in March 2019 with the ESLR being extended beyond Woodside station and depot, with a flat crossing being created across the start of a new standard gauge tram track.
During 2019, the line was laid along two sides of the ‘new' field using rail sourced from a Ministry of Defence site in Scotland. By that September, the track had been laid to the new station site.
A year later, a new platform had been built.
Doubling the original line's length of 300 yards, the work was carried out by permanent way trains, mainly hauled using the rarely-used Ruston Hornsby 4wDM locomotive No. 177604 of 1936 Leiston.
Due to ongoing coronavirus restrictions, the new extension did not open until the spring of this year and is the first of the three main transport systems at the museum to be expanded.
Once the new tram line is completed, a signalling system will have to be installed on the flat crossing to ensure safe operation, but for now this is not a problem.