National Lottery Grants for Heritage – £250,000 to £5million
Set in the historic slate landscape of north Wales, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Boston Lodge is the world’s oldest continuously operating railway engineering works. The Boston Lodge Project is bringing local communities behind the scenes to inspire and engage new visitors and volunteers.
New signboards, buildings and tours tell the story of the railway’s past, while restorations and repairs are securing the site’s future. Thanks to the renovations, historic workshops including the Blacksmiths and Iron Foundry are being brought back into use. Preserving and developing skills is at the heart of the project, which is creating training opportunities including:
- volunteer roles and projects
- work placements for young people
- traineeships in project management, operations and interpretation
- public workshops
- a new training and research centre named after The National Lottery Heritage Fund
Edwina Ball, Project Manager, said: “The project brings about a step change for the railway, improving how we tell our story across the 40 miles of railway. It will also help make Boston Lodge an engineering site fit for the future, where we can showcase both its history and the skills still being used to build and maintain locomotives and carriages.”
