The Sierra Leone Government Railway ran on tracks just two feet six inches apart - a narrow gauge that wound from Freetown deep into the interior, knitting the country together for the better part of a century. On the recommendation of an international bank, it was closed in 1974 as uneconomic, and in the years that followed the iron rails were torn up and carried off. But someone, at the moment of closure, had the foresight to set aside a collection of the finest rolling stock at the Cline Town workshops: steam locomotives, diesels, and a handful of irreplaceable coaches, gathered as the seed of a museum that would take three decades to bloom.

The crown jewels of the collection are two very different machines. One is a Beyer-Garratt steam locomotive - an articulated 4-8-2 + 2-8-4 monster built in Manchester in 1955, which, at around seventy tons, ranks among the heaviest and most powerful engines ever to run on a two-foot-six-inch gauge anywhere in the world. The other is a thing of ceremony rather than brute force: a coach built at the Cline Town works in 1961 specially for the visit of Queen Elizabeth II, who visited the newly independent nation in late 1961. A working giant and a royal carriage, sharing the same shed - the whole arc of a railway from labour to pageantry, preserved under one roof.

The collection's survival is almost miraculous. Through the years of civil war the workshops were occupied as a centre for displaced persons, and the engines vanished from public view - many assumed them lost for good. When Colonel Davies rediscovered them, restoration began in 2004, and the late President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah lent his support to preserving the country's railway heritage. The Sierra Leone National Railway Museum opened in Cline Town in 2005, sustained ever since by a group of British enthusiasts who became its Friends. Inside, alongside the locomotives, hang the small relics of a railway age - old photographs, tickets, maps, and timetables for trains that no longer run. The engines that everyone gave up for dead now wait, polished, for visitors who come to see what was saved.