You Can Drive a 40-Ton Locomotive Near Rutland Water for Just £5

A museum near Rutland Water is offering visitors the chance to drive a 40-ton diesel locomotive for £5 — and if that is not enough, the same site is home to a steam engine that survived the fall of Singapore, was captured by the Japanese, and came home with bullet holes to prove it.

Drive a Rolls-Royce Locomotive for a Fiver

Rocks by Rail — the Living Ironstone Museum — sits off Ashwell Road in Cottesmore, about four miles from Oakham in Rutland. This Sunday, 19 April, for the price of a pint, visitors aged 16 and over can climb into the cab of a 40-ton diesel shunter and take it half a mile down a slope before bringing it back up again.

Museum trustee and spokesman Clive Wood said the experience regularly catches people off guard. “People get in the cab with an experienced driver on hand to take them through the controls. You’ve got to follow the rules and stick to the 5mph speed limit. It sounds slow but when you’re careering down the slope it can get quite hairy. At the end everyone has a big smile on their face.”

Wood is keen to point out that driving a locomotive is rather more involved than simply pulling a lever. “It’s not just pulling on a lever,” he said. “It’s a very tactile thing.” Controlling the throttle and the brake on 40 tonnes of moving metal requires skill and concentration — and the downhill section, even at 5mph, gives the experience a genuine edge.

The locomotive in question has one more selling point. “The 40-ton diesel shunter we’re using has a Rolls-Royce engine in it,” Clive added. “So you can tell people you’ve not only driven a locomotive but also driven a Rolls-Royce.”

The museum itself is open from 10am until 4pm on Sunday. Admission costs £6 for adults and £4 for children, with the driving experience costing an additional £5. The café will be open for refreshments.

The Museum — and the Locomotive That Went to War

Rocks by Rail has been on this site since 1980, when a small group of enthusiasts purchased six acres of former derelict railway land on the eastern end of the Cottesmore Mineral Branch from British Rail. It has grown into a 19-acre outdoor living museum covering reclaimed quarry land, railway tracks and nature trails, dedicated to telling the story of ironstone quarrying in Rutland — an industry that shaped the county’s landscape for over a century.

The fleet includes several diesel locomotives, a spectacular dragline excavator that puts on demonstrations of quarrying at scale, and a range of industrial rolling stock. But the most extraordinary exhibit at the site is a steam locomotive called Singapore.

Built in 1936 at the Forth Banks Works of Hawthorn, Leslie & Co. in Newcastle, Singapore was delivered new to the Royal Navy dockyard in Singapore, where it was used for shunting stores and equipment supplying warships. In February 1942, when Japanese forces completed their invasion of Malaya and the largest surrender of British-led forces in history took place, Singapore the locomotive became a prisoner of war alongside 80,000 allied servicemen. It still carries bullet and shrapnel holes from the air raids during the fall of the city.

The locomotive was repatriated to the UK in December 1953 and served at Chatham Dockyards before entering preservation. It was purchased by two of the museum’s founder members in 1978 and brought to Rutland, where it became the first working steam locomotive in the collection. Following an overhaul funded partly by the Heritage Lottery Fund, it was officially registered as a national war memorial — dedicated to the courage, sacrifice and comradeship of Far Eastern Prisoners of War, one in four of whom did not survive captivity. The museum has held commemorations at the locomotive on the anniversaries of the fall of Singapore.

A second steam locomotive, known as #1931, is set to be in action at the museum later this year.

Rutland’s Best-Kept Secret Deserves to Be Found

Rutland is England’s smallest county. It has Rutland Water, it has Oakham, it has the kind of rolling countryside that makes you wonder why you ever bothered with the Peak District. What it does not have, in most people’s mental map of the East Midlands, is a 19-acre industrial heritage museum on a reclaimed ironstone quarry with a war memorial locomotive and a chance to drive a Rolls-Royce diesel engine for the price of a coffee.

Rocks by Rail is, by any measure, a remarkable place — and it is run almost entirely by volunteers who genuinely know what they are talking about. The Tripadvisor reviews use words like “little gem” and “living history” with a sincerity that you do not usually associate with online tourism reviews. Visitors consistently describe leaving conversations with volunteers who worked in the quarrying industry themselves, or whose families did. This is not a theme park approximation of industrial heritage. It is the thing itself, carefully preserved by people who care about it.

There is something particularly striking about a museum that charges £5 for what is, objectively, one of the more unusual experiences available anywhere in the East Midlands. You can pay considerably more for considerably less at leisure attractions across the region. The “Driver for a Fiver” event is not a gimmick to pull in visitors — it is exactly what it says it is, and the people who run it have been doing it for years because they want as many people as possible to understand what these machines actually feel like.

The Singapore locomotive deserves to be known about far beyond the people who already know about Rocks by Rail. A steam engine that was at the Royal Navy dockyard when Singapore fell, that was captured by the Japanese, that came home with bullet holes, and that is now a registered national war memorial sitting in a Rutland field — that is an extraordinary thing. It is the kind of object that, if it were in a major city museum, would have a dedicated gallery and a long queue. In Cottesmore, you can walk up to it on a Sunday morning after driving a diesel engine down a slope, and there will be a volunteer nearby who can tell you everything about it.

If you are looking for something to do this weekend — or if you want to file it away for a future visit — Rocks by Rail is absolutely worth the trip. We will keep an eye on what else they have coming up this year, including the steam days when #1931 will be in action.

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