Mangapps Railway Museum

Mangapps Railway Museum near Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex is one of Britain's most comprehensive privately-owned railway collections, assembled over more than three decades by the Jolly family on their working farm and now encompassing one of the largest accumulations of Great Eastern Railway and East Anglian railway artefacts anywhere in the preservation world.

The museum is unusual in having been built entirely from scratch rather than on a former railway alignment — the running line and station buildings were constructed across farmland, with station buildings, signal boxes, platform furniture, and infrastructure rescued from threatened closures across East Anglia and re-erected at Mangapps to create an authentic railway environment. Two signal boxes from former GER and British Railways installations, an engine shed, and a substantial collection of station signs, nameplates, lamps, and company artefacts give the site a depth of railway atmosphere that extends well beyond the modest running line.

The locomotive and rolling stock collection includes steam and diesel engines, former GER and LNER coaching stock, and a variety of freight vehicles representative of the East Anglian railway scene. Mangapps sits alongside the East Anglian Railway Museum at Chappel and the Colne Valley Railway as part of the remarkable concentration of GER heritage preservation in Essex — a county whose railway history is dominated by the Great Eastern and whose preservation community has worked conscientiously to document and conserve it.