Colin Divall
a three-month exhibition, Lost Tracks – Remembering East Dorset’s Railways, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Old Road’s closure293. Figure 7 – Lost Tracks exhibition, Wimborne, April 2014: graphic panel at Allendale House (left), booking hall room set at the Priest’s House Museum (right).
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This was organized in conjunction with the East Dorset Heritage Trust, which provided part of its headquarters, Allendale House, for half the exhibition. The displays mixed graphic panels with artefacts to highlight episodes from the Old Road’s history in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries while the PHM built a room set based on a station booking hall to focus more on the post-war experience of passengers, workers and local residents. Over 2,500 visitors paid to visit the museum while the exhibition was on. Another well-established local organization, Wimborne Railway Society, also commemorates part of the Old Road, albeit at considerably less than full size. Formed around 1975, shortly before the last trains ran through the town’s station, the society includes modellers among its 100 or so members294. A model of Wimborne station built to the popular UK scale of 1:76 was started in 1977, exhibited locally in 1979 and, at least in part, several times thereafter. Like most models to this scale, some compromises were necessary in order to make it a manageable size, but the result was a reasonable representation of the station in the 1950s and early 1960s. Rebuilding started in 2011 and continues today.
293 James Webb of the PHM was the curator while Sarah Evans facilitated at Allendale House; Peter Russell of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Heritage Trust and I were curatorial advisers. The PHM had mounted a popular exhibition on local railways in the mid-1990s. 294 http://www.wimrail.org.uk/ (accessed 15 December 2015). On the popularity of railway modelling in the UK, see CARTER, 2008: 192-263 (note 24).