Crich Tramway Museum

 The Tramway Museum is located at Crich in Derbyshire, between Matlock and Ripley.  It has a good car park and magnificent peak district scenery.  The museum has a lot of trams from around the UK and Europe.  Many of them are in working condition and they are used to carry museum visitors along the tramway, past the nearby quarry and back.

 When you enter the museum, you are given an old penny.  This can be used on the trams to purchase a day ticket, which gives you access to ride the trams as often as you like.  Which trams you travel on depends upon which vehicles are on the tracks on the day of your visit.

 In the village there is the Red Lion public house.  This building was moved from Stoke-on-Trent, where it used to stand in Stoke, on Church Street - only a 25 minutes walk from where we live now.

 The trams that were running during our visit were Glasgow street trams.  There was an open top tram and an enclosed tram, both with two decks.

 The conductor was there to collect fairs and issue day tickets to adults and children.  The children's fair was a half penny.  This also included a short talk at the quarry terminus to give a brief history of the tram and explain about the woodland walk back to the village, where there are a variety of sculptures and good views of the hills.  A certificate of travel was available to those who had some spare change to donate.

In the exhibition halls are lots of trams, some of which are open to step inside.
The last time I visited this museum was when I was at school, at the age of 10.  It is still a captivating place, evoking memories of the past and giving a good feeling of how life would have been like in the early years of the last century.
Of course, we had lunch in the Red Lion.  What a treat.