Nottingham Transport Heritage Centre

The Great Central Railway (Nottingham) (formerly known as Nottingham Transport Heritage Centre) is a heritage railway and Transport Museum on the south side of the village of Ruddington in Nottinghamshire. The route consists of almost 10 miles (16 km) of the former Great Central Railway Main Line between Loughborough South Junction (with the Midland Main Line), to Fifty Steps Bridge and the site of Ruddington's former GCR station site, plus a branch line from Fifty Steps Bridge to the Ruddington Fields site which is located on a former Ministry of Defence site next to Rushcliffe Country Park.

There are currently stations at Ruddington Fields (within the main centre site) and at Rushcliffe Halt, but the GCR(N) aims to re-open the former station at East Leake in the future, and there are plans to build a high-level (interchange) station at Loughborough (as there is currently no platform there).

The railway is currently not connected to Great Central Railway (at Loughborough Central in Leicestershire), although there are plans well underway and work has started to reunite the two preserved lines. This is a major engineering project that is expected to be completed during 2018 - 2020. Some 5.5 miles (8.9 km) of the line is used by gypsum trains serving the British Gypsum works at East Leake.

After the major part of the GCR main line was closed by British Rail in 1968 a section from Nottingham to Rugby was retained until 1976. Presevationists had hoped to convert that into a live heritage line, but funding was impossible to obtain — except for the length from Loughborough to Belgrave and Birstall, north of Leicester. British Rail decided to maintain rail connection from Loughborough to Ruddington MoD depot until closure and the GCR main line became an unsignalled BR single-track branch. When the Ministry of Defence depot at Ruddington was closed, so the 2.77 miles (4.46 km) of track from East Leake to Ruddington were no longer needed by BR. It was also considered that British Gypsum was unlikely to bring in any more bulk materials from coal-fired power stations by rail. The GCR Northern Development Association was formed with the aim of reconnecting the then two GCR sections once again. Work initially concentrated on restoring Rushcliffe Halt, but when Nottinghamshire County Council, which had acquired the whole of the 220 acre MoD site, agreed to lease 12 acres of the former MOD site to the Association, the grand scheme of the Nottingham Transport Heritage Centre was devised to encompass not only railway preservation but any transport heritage relevant to the area.

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Wikipedia