The Bygones experience is privately O\vned and is run by the Cumming family. Ken
Cumming had been a keen collector of railway related items for many years, and his
wife liked to collect antiques. Ken's home and garden was filled with relics from the age
of the steam railway. The turning point in his hobby came in 1986, when he returned
home from a collectors sale al Falmouth Docks with news of his latest acquisition. Now,
we the readers of this magazine are all collectors of one sort or another, but 1 am not
sure what Elaine would say if I came home and told l1er l had just bought a 28 ton
railway tank engine for my collection. But that was exactly what Ken had done. The
engine was too big to go in the garden and it would never fit in the house, so a suitable
home had to be found.
At that time Ken and his wife were running the post office in St Mary Church, and
3 doors away from their post office stood an empty cinema. They decided to take the
plunge, and very quickly sold the post office and bought the old cinema with the
intention of opening a railway museum. One of the first jobs they had to do was to
carefully remove part of the front wall of the building. Then ,vith the aid of some heavy
lifting equipment, they slowly inched the 28 ton engine into the foyer of the old cinema.
The wall was then rebuilt. Ken knew that not everyone was interested in steam trains, so
he drew up plans to convert the whole of the cinema's ground floor into a Victorian
street scene with cobbles, fully stocked period shops and a pub. For this he employed a
skilled stone mason and a joiner, and together they began to bring Ken's dream to life,
and very realistic it is too. With the period noises and the smells you begin to feel as
though you have travelled back to the Victorian era. The second floor is set out with
period domestic room settings, and display cases stacked full of the everyday bric-a-brac
of the past 100 years. You are constantly reminded of how things used to be in your
younger days, with comments like "my grandma had one of those" or "how did we
manage with that?" On the top floor you will find a wonderful model railway with trains
that you can control yourself by pushing one of several buttons along the front of the
display case. The top floor is also where you will find the Station cafe. In fact, Elaine
found the cafe before l found the model railway, so I was "shunted" into the sidings for
a cup of tea and a cake. The cafe as you would expect is decorated with old station signs
and railway related artefacts of a time long past.
Once out of the cafe and past the model railway, we came upon my favourite part
of the tour, and my main reason for the visit: the vintage slot machine arcade. Now, this
may not be the biggest arcade I have visited, but it does have some excellent machines
for you to play. Some of the machines are for two players, like the Ahrens 2 player
football ganle, with both teanls sporting their hand knitted jerseys, one team in white and
the other in red. The machine is in very good condition and working order, but how they
managed to carry it up to the top floor is any one's guess. Other two player ganles were
by Ruffier & Walker. One was the Helicopter and the other was the Grand National.
Again both were in good working order. You will also find a selection of Mutoscope
type viewers standing alongside some of Fred Bollands working models. There is the
Drunkards Dream, the Night Watchman & the Haunted Churchyard. It was nice to see
the three machines all lined up in the same room.
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