Pendon Museum

Pendon Museum, located in Long Wittenham near Didcot, Oxfordshire, England, displays typical scenes on the Great Western Railway (GWR) of the 1920s.

The main display and ongoing project at Pendon is a scale representation of the Vale of White Horse as it was in the interwar period. The scene is centred around the 'typical' village of Pendon Parva, which is served by a railway station on the main London to Bristol GWR main line that runs through the Vale, and another on the M&SWJR that became one of the constituent companies of the GWR in 1923. The topography and the village layout is fictional, but every building and significant feature is an exact model of a real building from the Vale of White Horse.

On the ground floor of the museum a model representing a Great Western Railway branch line on Dartmoor, originally built to showcase the trains being built for the Vale scene, is operated for visitors. The main focus of the Dartmoor scene is a model of Brunel's timber Walkham viaduct built by R. Guy Williams.

The museum includes displays of individual models, modelling methods and railway artifacts. The museum also displays "Madder Valley", a pioneering model railway built by John Ahern. Founded by the late Roye England, the layout is run a by group of volunteers and is open to the public most weekends and holidays. The model trains are hand-built, to represent individual locomotives, carriages and wagons as exactly possible, based on surviving records and photographs. Operation consists of a sequence of trains, showing what one could have seen passing by on a summer day and night, in the mid 1920s. This sequence is based on timetables of the period. They are all modelled in 4mm to 1 foot scale, and run on track of 18mm gauge (EM).

Location

The museum is located at Ordnance Survey mapping six-figure gbmapping|SU542935.

External links

* [http://www.pendonmuseum.com/ Pendon Museum official website]