Qualla: Narrow Gauge Railway Museum

Narrow Gauge Railway Museum: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Voice of Clam, Public domain. Inside one room at the Narrow Gauge Railway Museum, the furniture is wrong. There is a desk and a chair and a small lamp, and an inkwell, all arranged as if someone had just stood up and walked out for a cup of tea. The room is called the Awdry Study, and the furniture belonged to the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, a Cheshire vicar who volunteered on the nearby Talyllyn Railway in the 1950s and who wrote a small book about a small engine called Thomas. The Skarloey Railway in his books is the Talyllyn, only fictionalised; the small locomotives that Thomas works alongside are recognisably the same engines that pull tourists from Tywyn Wharf station today. Awdry's desk sits among the wagons and signals because he is, in a sense, what the museum is also about: how the small railways of Britain came to mean something larger than their gauge.

Image: Voice of Clam | Public domain

Narrow Gauge Railway Museum: The First Voluntary Railway Society

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rolgiati, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society was founded in 1950 and took control of the failing Talyllyn slate line in February 1951. It was the first voluntary society anywhere in the world to take over and operate a public passenger-carrying railway. Within months, the news had s...

Image: Rolgiati | CC BY-SA 3.0

Narrow Gauge Railway Museum: Eighty Railways, One Thousand Objects

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Camboxer, CC BY-SA 4.0. The collection now holds more than a thousand items from over eighty narrow gauge railways spread across Wales, England, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and Scotland. Six locomotives are on display, with more in store. Eleven wagons inside, another eleven outside. Track sections from e...

Image: Camboxer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Narrow Gauge Railway Museum: The 2005 Rebuild

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Necrothesp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the late 1990s the building had reached the end of what it could do. It was damp in winter, hot in summer, and the collection was deteriorating in conditions the curators could no longer accept. With the golden jubilee of the Preservation Society approaching in 2000, an appeal...

Image: Necrothesp at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Narrow Gauge Railway Museum: The Tank Engine and the Vicarage

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Voice of Clam, Public domain. Wilbert Awdry came to the Talyllyn in 1952, two years after he had published The Three Railway Engines and a year after Thomas the Tank Engine. He volunteered as a guard, signalman, and station master at various points, and he based much of the Skarloey Railway, the small narrow ...

Image: Voice of Clam | Public domain