A local museum group is celebrating a grant which will enable it to preserve valuable pieces of history from the Industrial Revolution.

The Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust has been awarded £3,500 from Arts Council England’s PRISM fund to carry out conservation on a significant collection of early railway artefacts. The collection was brought together by Dr Michael Lewis and covers many of the early quarry and mining railways of England, Wales and Scotland. The objects relate not to the locomotives, but to the construction of the railways themselves, and are a vital record of the ways that track developed over time.

A dedicated team will be carrying out a full conservation survey, cleaning, and stabilising the objects along with photographing, recording, and storing the objects to the highest museum standards. Dr Matt Thompson, senior curator at the Ironbridge Gorge Museums said: “This collection provides insights into the development of the railways from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century and will be a significant resource for future scholars studying the birth of the railways in Great Britain.”