Pendon Museum facts for kids
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| Established | 1954 |
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| Location | Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire, England |
| Type | History museum |
| Founder | Roye England |
The Pendon Museum is a special museum in Long Wittenham, near Didcot, Oxfordshire, England. It's famous for its amazing scale models. The biggest display is a huge miniature world showing parts of the Vale of White Horse area as it looked in the 1920s and 1930s.
This incredible model scene has been built since the 1950s. It's based on very detailed studies of the real buildings and countryside. Some tiny model cottages took hundreds of hours to make! The museum was started by Roye England, an Australian artist who loved England. He worked with Guy Williams, a talented English model maker who built 57 of the museum's 90 model trains. You can even see them working together in an old film from 1958 called 'Hair Thatching'.
Today, a group of dedicated volunteers runs the museum. It's usually open to visitors on most weekends and holidays, and also on Wednesdays during school holidays.
Contents
History of the Museum
The Pendon Museum was founded by Roye England. He was an artist and craftsman who loved model railways. Roye noticed that many old, historic buildings in the area were being changed or even pulled down. He decided to create detailed models of them to preserve their memory.
Both the main Vale of White Horse scene and other displays show working model railways. These models show typical scenes from the Great Western Railway (GWR) in the 1920s. The trains themselves are also very accurate models of the trains that ran on those lines back then.
Amazing Displays
The Vale of White Horse
The main and biggest display at Pendon is a miniature version of the Vale of White Horse. It shows how the area looked between World War I and World War II. The heart of this scene is a "typical" village called Pendon Parva. This village has a railway station on the main London to Bristol GWR line. There's also another station on the M&SWJR line, which later became part of the GWR.
While the layout of the land and the village are made up, every single building and important feature is an exact model of a real building from the Vale of White Horse. It's like stepping back in time!
Here are some of the model trains you can see on this layout:
- GWR 2900 Class No. 2943 Hampton Court (built in 1912)
- GWR 4000 Class No. 4050 Princess Alice (built in 1914)
- GWR 2251 Class No. 2253 (built in 1930)
- LSWR N15 Class No. 789 Sir Guy (built in 1925)
- GWR 3700 Class No. 3705 Mauritius
- LSWR S15 class No. 515 (built in 1921)
Dartmoor Branch Line
On the ground floor of the museum, there's another model railway. This one shows a Great Western Railway branch line on Dartmoor. It was first built in 1955 to show off the trains being made for the main Vale scene. Visitors can watch these trains run.
A key part of the Dartmoor scene is a model of Brunel's famous wooden railway bridge, called a viaduct, at Walkham in Devon. This model was built by R. Guy Williams, who also created many of the model trains at the museum.
Some trains on this layout include:
- GWR 2900 Class No. 2921 Saint Dunstan (built in 1907)
- GWR 2800 Class No. 2844 (built in 1912)
- LSWR M7 Class No. 30 (built in 1904)
Madder Valley Display
The museum also has other displays, including individual models, explanations of how models are made, and old railway items. One special display is Madder Valley, a very important and early model railway built by John Ahern.
How the Models are Made
The model trains at Pendon are built by hand. They are made to look exactly like real locomotives, carriages, and wagons. The model makers use old records and photographs to get every detail right.
The trains on the main display run in a special order. This sequence shows what you might have seen passing by on a summer day and night in the mid-1920s. This order is based on the actual train timetables from that time! All the models are built to a scale of 4 mm to 1 foot (which is 1:76 scale). They run on tracks that are 18mm wide, a combination known as EM gauge.
