Please support the track appeal - to complete the Mountsorrel Railway!

The Mountsorrel Railway project has come so far in such a short time. It has now reached a point where progress is only limited by a lack of money. Would you consider donating to the Mountsorrel Railway track appeal, so trains can run again from the Great Central Railway (GCR) towards Mountsorrel?



Since Steve Cramp and a large team of volunteers began work in 2007, most of the mile-long route between Swithland Sidings and Lafarge Quarry, disused since the 1950s, has been cleared and ballasted. Not only that but the bridge over the track has been repaired, three replica Mountsorrel wagons have been recreated, and over 300 children have taken part in activities with their schools and groups on the trackbed.

All this for only £4,500! (mostly the labour, machinery and ballast on the project has been donated by volunteers and local companies, for which we are extremely grateful)

Projects on the scale of the Mountsorrel Railway typically cost £1 million per mile of track to complete. We “only” need £150,000 to complete the project, which will cover buying, lifting, transporting and laying a mile of rail and 1,500 sleepers, and other items required to complete the railway.

Please see the Mountsorrel Railway track appeal donation form for more information about the appeal. You can help by donating whatever money you can afford, for example:

• You could sponsor one or more sleepers at £15 each
• You could sponsor one or more lengths of rail at £180 each
• You could setup a standing order donation to the appeal, which would help reopen the Mountsorrel Railway even sooner

Exclusive incentives are available too, depending on the value of your donation. For more information contact George Overton. Incentives include:

• a personal, extensive tour of the Mountsorrel Railway led by project leader Steve Cramp
• travel on a Travelling Post Office during a non stop mail exchange on the GCR (not normally available to the public)
• an invitation to ride on one of the first trains to travel on the recreated Mountsorrel Railway!

Your donation to the track appeal would help complete this unique and highly praised project. The GCR hopes to provide the chance for visitors to ride on the line, adding another aspect to the GCR: demonstrating how freight trains used to arrive in Swithland Yard from the quarry, their wagons ready for shunting, so the stone could be sent onwards by train across the country. There are important educational aspects to the project too. Rebuilding the branch provides an illustration not just of railway operation but rural life, and would be of enormous benefit to local schoolchildren.

Please support the Mountsorrel Railway track appeal and print off and complete the appeal form today. If you have any questions please contact George Overton. Thank you for your support.

Latest junior ecology session planned for Saturday February 13th

We're pleased to announce that Lesley Humphries' popular junior ecology sessions will be returning on Saturday February 13th. This time Lesley will be helping the children to construct bird feeders, which will be placed along the trackbed to help our feathered friends through the rigours of winter!

The session will run from 2:00pm until around 3:45pm and is aimed at children of all ages, although children must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. The project makes no charge for attending these sessions.

The meeting point is on the grassy area on the corner of the Halstead Road/Swithland Lane/Wood Lane Road junction (at the tree symbol on the map below). If you would like further information please contact Lesley.


View Route of Mountsorrel Railway in a larger map

Note: this session was originally planned for Saturday 6th February but has been moved to 13th February.

See us at the Great Central Railway gala this weekend!

At the forthcoming Great Central Railway (GCR) winter steam gala this weekend, Mountsorrel Railway volunteers will be staffing a stand at Rothley station. Please come and see us!

We'll be there all day on Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 January should you like to find out more about the project. Look out for our banner! You'll be able to talk to the people involved, ask questions, see photos, and see a scale model of the proposed Bond Lane halt. On the Saturday you'll also be able to see restoration of the latest Mountsorrel Railway wagon taking place!

Additionally, if you visit us, you'll be in a prime spot to see the exciting line up of engines the GCR has arranged for the gala! And members of our sponsor charity Railway Vehicle Preservations will be on hand to show you round their latest restoration project in the Rothley carriage shed.

Rothley station is here:


View Route of Mountsorrel Railway in a larger map

For more about the gala, please see the video below:



We hope to see you there! For more information contact George Overton.

Loughborough University sponsors wagon restoration project!

Loughborough University has very kindly provided a £500 grant towards the restoration costs of the third replica Mountsorrel Granite Company wagon. We are very grateful for this support from the university in recognition of the educational opportunities offered by our fleet of historic wagons. Once track is laid on the Mountsorrel Railway, the project hopes to include the wagons in historical recreations on the rebuilt branch line. Some of these recreations involve educational projects with local primary schools, aimed at allowing our younger generation to experience and reenact scenes from a bygone age.

Our young volunteer wagon team has already been hard at work putting the grant to good use and the restoration of the wagon is well under way.



Volunteer Steve Cramp, who leads the project, comments "The public has been generous in their support for our historical wagon restoration project. This, coupled with a grant from East Midlands Airport for the signwriting costs, has allowed us to complete the first two wagons, but we were left with a funding gap to complete the third and final wagon. Loughborough University's very generous grant plugs that hole and allows us to complete the wagon restoration project and unlock the historical educational potential they hold. We hope to have the third wagon completed by the end of February".

For more information about the wagon restoration, or the wider Mountsorrel Railway project, please contact George Overton.

Happy Christmas from the Mountsorrel Railway

The project would like to thank our many volunteers, supporters and companies who have aided the project over the last year. We wish all our website readers a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. Next year we should see track on the branch, and hopefully trains!

In the meantime, even this close to Christmas, two important aspects of the project have moved on considerably:

Wood Lane bridge east side repointing completed!

Project volunteers have been working throughout this past year to repair the Mountsorrel Railway bridge at the top of Wood Lane. The work has been extensive, as reported in previous updates. Recently volunteers have been repointing the parapet walls which has been a painstaking and time consuming task. We are pleased to report that the eastern parapet wall has now been completed!

This has been possible through a donation by Mountsorrel Parish Council towards the material costs for the work. We are very grateful to the Parish Council for their support for the project. We would also like to express our thanks to the many volunteers, mostly from our local community, who have given their time over the last year to help restore the bridge, the end result looks fantastic! We also thank Lafarge Aggregates and Stonehurst Family Farm who have supported work done earlier in the year on the bridge.


Photo courtesy Nigel Harris

In November the project received a donation of 350 daffodil bulbs from a Mountsorrel resident who expressed a wish that they be planted around the bridge faces, in the hope that next spring they would help to show off our restoration work to full effect. The project is very grateful for this donation and volunteers have planted the bulbs has requested.



Attention is now turning to the west side parapet wall which is also in urgent need of repointing and repair. The material cost for this side of the bridge is expected to be around £50. If you or your company would like to sponsor the repair of the west side of the bridge, please get in touch with Steve Cramp.

Work begins on the third and final replica Mountsorrel wagon

Hot on the heels of our first two restored wagons, volunteer restoration work has now started on the third and final replica Mountsorrel Granite Company wagon. Volunteers have already stripped the existing rotten timbers from the floor, prepared the steel work for painting, commenced painting of the frames and made a start on preparing the sides for painting. At present work is being undertaken primarily by our Tuesday evening volunteer team. Our Tuesday evening team of teenage girls has now increased to seven, one of whom is working on the wagon as part of her Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme.



Wagon work will pause over the Christmas break, but if you would like to get involved, either on Saturdays, or Tuesday evenings, please get in touch with Steve Cramp.

Thanks again for your support and have a happy Christmas.

Recent press coverage

News of the ballast link up to the Great Central Railway, and progress with the wagon restoration, has really caught the public's imagination!

Over the last few weeks we've had some great exposure in the press:

• A further piece in the Quorndon Magazine. The article is reproduced, with permission, here and here. The Quorndon is the quarterly magazine for the village of Quorn. © 2008 The Quorndon. Further reproduction prohibited without written permission.
  

• An article in the Leicester Mercury.

• Pieces in the Mountsorrel Post and The Forest.
  

• Two articles in the latest Steam Railway magazine, the world's biggest selling steam magazine.

We're very grateful to these publications for their support.

And, even with Christmas coming, volunteers will still be working hard on the project. There will be work ongoing on the trackbed in the coming weeks, restoration of the third wagon, and behind the scenes work securing track and fundraising. If you would like to offer your help, either with volunteering or fundraising, please let us know.

Further ballast laying complete

A milestone point in the project has been reached, thanks to local firm McCanns donating their equipment and operators for free. There is now ballast laid from the junction with the Great Central Railway all the way up most of the route of the Mountsorrel Railway to the Wood Lane bridge.

Compare a photo of the junction in October 2007 (taken by Nigel Harris) with the very different scene snapped earlier this week:





Massive thanks to all the volunteers who have really worked hard over these last two days with very little notice and at times pretty unkind weather! We really could not have done this without them.

We must also thank McCanns, who have gone to extreme lengths to help us this week, and Haydn Yeo, project volunteer, for introducing us to and liaising with McCanns. Without Haydn and McCanns, we would not have been able to undertake two long sessions of ballast laying in July and November, lift the Wood Lane bridge stone, or other tasks requiring their equipment and expertise.

Thanks too to the Great Central Railway, who have had to make special arrangements so the ballast laying could take place this week, and to Lafarge of course for donating the ballast.

Second childrens' ecology activity session builds on the success of the first!

On Saturday October 31, Mountsorrel Railway Ecology Group volunteer Lesley Humphries ran the second of our hugely successful children's ecology activity sessions.



These sessions are aimed at opening up the ecology of the trackbed and its surroundings to our younger generation and their parents. The railway is blessed with a wealth of wildlife, which our ecology group strives to maintain and encourage.



Our latest event involved the children and their parents studying the wildlife that had taken up residence in wildlife habitats that the children helped to build at the first session in September. The children were able to take bark rubbings and learnt to identify the types of trees along the line and how to tell one from the other. They also examined some of the 17 species of wild flowers that are still flowering along the trackbed.



These sessions are aimed at children of all ages and are open to anyone who would like to bring their children along. The project makes no charge for taking part in these events. The next session will be early in the New Year; further details will follow nearer the time.

Second replica Mountsorrel wagon completed in record time

We are pleased to announce the completion of the second replica Mountsorrel Granite Company wagon!



Impressed by our work on the first wagon, RVP kindly allowed us to use space on their siding inside Rothley carriage shed for the second restoration. This meant that we were not restricted by the British weather as we were with the first wagon. This allowed our volunteers to really go to town and, coupled with our restoration knowledge obtained during the first restoration, we were able to push on at lightning speed with volunteer activity occurring almost daily over the last few weeks!



From start to finish the wagon took only five and a half weeks to restore! That's not to say that less work was required, far from it! A new floor had to be made and fitted together with full derusting and repainting of the metal frames both inside and out. End planks needed to be replaced as well meaning that the work required was almost on a par with the first wagon. As with the first wagon, even the bits you can't see have all been thoroughly restored as well.



Thanks must go to all our volunteers who have worked on the wagon over the last few weeks. Our volunteers have included people from all areas of the community from teenagers up to volunteers in their late 70s. Our wagon restoration project really seems to have caught the imagination of the community. We are also very grateful to East Midlands Airport for sponsoring the signwriting costs of all three wagons and to all our supporters who have donated funds to aid the wagon restoration project.



The wagons will form the core of historical recreations on the rebuilt branch line. These include a project we are undertaking with local primary schools to allow today's children to take part in a recreation of the Sunday school outings that used to run on the Mountsorrel Railway in the 1920s and 30s.

We are about to start work on the third and final wagon, so it's still not to late to help out with our wagon project, volunteers are always welcome (contact Steve Cramp). Alternatively you may wish to support our work with a financial donation. Thank you.

Childrens' ecology session this Saturday

This Saturday afternoon, 31 October, volunteer Lesley Humphries will be running her latest childrens' ecology activity session. The children will be investigating the wildlife habitats that have been built around the trackbed, and other activities. The event will have an autumn/Halloween theme!

Please let Lesley know if you'd like to attend this event.

If you'd rather take part in other volunteer activity this Saturday, between 9am and 4pm our volunteers will be clearing the trackbed around the Wood Lane bridge. Please e-mail Steve Cramp if you'd like to join in.

Your support with both of these initiatives would be much appreciated. Many thanks.