National Tramway Museum

rdf:langString National Tramway Museum

rdf:langString The National Tramway Museum (trading as Crich Tramway Village) is a tram museum located at Crich, Derbyshire, England. The museum contains over 60 (mainly British) trams built between 1873 and 1982 and is set within a recreated period village containing a working pub, cafe, old-style sweetshop and tram depots. The museum's collection of trams runs through the village-setting with visitors transported out into the local countryside and back. The museum is operated by the Tramway Museum Society, a registered charity. The trams at Crich mostly ran in cities in the United Kingdom prior to the 1960s, with trams rescued (even from other countries) as the systems closed. Most of the UK tram networks, with a few exceptions closed before the 1960s. The last to close was Glasgow Corporation Tramways in 1962, a tramway well represented at the museum, leaving just the Blackpool Tramway as the sole surviving first-generation tramway. There has been a recent revival in the use of trams, with new networks opened including Tramlink, Sheffield Supertram, West Midlands Metro, Edinburgh Trams, Manchester Metrolink and the nearby Nottingham Express Transit being built and extended. In recent years the work of the society members and the income earned from visitors has been supplemented by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Designation Challenge Fund of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and the DEFRA Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund. The Crich Tramway Village remains an independent charity, which receives no funding from the state or local government and relies on the voluntary contribution made by members of the Tramway Museum Society and its visitors. The village is also home to the Eagle Press, a small museum dedicated to letterpress printing including an 1859 Columbian printing press.