Friends of the Sierra Leone National Railway Museum

The museum’s past is an amazing story. Now we’d like you to join our incredible journey and make tracks to the future with us.

We have big ambitions and a long journey ahead, but we can only make it happen with your help and with you aboard.

Sierra Leone is one of the world’s poorest countries. It’s been ravaged by a bloody civil war and overcome an Ebola outbreak.

But this museum isn’t just a collection of British-built trains that were secretly hidden and locked away by heartbroken railwaymen from scrapmen for 30 years. It isn’t just the former home of 10,000 people seeking refuge from child soldiers in the shadows of rusting locomotives and inside Queen Elizabeth II’s forgotten royal train.

This museum is a beacon of hope. This museum has brought people together again in peacetime and after the Ebola outbreak to rebuild a happier nation, forge international friendships, create a new economy and begin to learn the importance of our shared histories and separate identities as way to succeed in the future.

This is a chance to use old British-built locomotives and stock as vehicles for aid and investment. This is a chance to make a railway museum an engine for growth and help rebuild a nation.

Never before has the heritage railway world had a chance to provide a humanitarian role on this scale. But now that time has come.