Qualla: Pallot Steam, Motor & General Museum

Pallot Steam, Motor & General Museum: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lyndon Charles Pallot - everyone called him Don - left school at fourteen, started remaking bicycles in the parish of Trinity on Jersey, and eventually became a trainee engineer with Jersey Railways, where he caught steam the way other people catch religion. He never let go. By the time he died in 1996 at the age of 85, he had spent decades quietly assembling the largest privately built collection of mechanical heritage in the Channel Islands - locomotives ferried in from Britain, Belgium, and Alderney; traction engines, motor cars, agricultural implements he had invented himself, and a Compton theatre organ that no normal collection would ever have made room for. The museum he founded in 1990 still runs the way he wanted it to. His surviving children are the trustees.

Image: Daniel Kraft | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pallot Steam, Motor & General Museum: An Engineer During the Occupation

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chickenofbristol at English Wikipedia derivative work: Dekel E, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the early 1930s, Pallot opened Central Motor Works at Sion in Trinity, an agricultural engineering shop. He invented and built tools that Jersey farmers needed - the Pallot elevator digger, the last-furrow reversible plough, the single-furrow reversible plough, the tractor-mou...

Image: Chickenofbristol at English Wikipedia derivative work: Dekel E | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pallot Steam, Motor & General Museum: Opening Day, 1990

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Embleton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The L C Pallot Trust was set up in 1985 to permanently preserve the collection - steam engines, farm machinery, vehicles, the lot. The Pallot Steam Museum opened in 1990. Items had been bought outright or acquired on long-term loan; railway locomotives had been imported from Brit...

Image: Bob Embleton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pallot Steam, Motor & General Museum: Two Railways and a Reconstructed Station

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Timothy Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around the perimeter of the museum site, a standard-gauge demonstration railway used to circle the buildings. The Victorian-style station was reconstructed using salvaged elements of Snow Hill railway station from Saint Helier - opened on Liberation Day 1996 by Senator Dick Shent...

Image: Timothy Titus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pallot Steam, Motor & General Museum: Dolly May

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christof46, CC BY-SA 4.0. Don Pallot lived at Sion with his wife Dolly. They had eleven children - six sons, five daughters. The Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies traction engine in the main hall, still operational, is named 'Dolly May' in her honour. It runs at Steam Fayres in May and Autumn, the museum's two m...

Image: Christof46 | CC BY-SA 4.0