Possibly best-known for being the last town in England before you arrive in France, relatively few visitors to Dover pause to consider its rich history as a port town and fortified defence since Roman times. Among all its attractions, only the 12th-century castle has widespread fame, but anyone with an interest in transport history ought to know about, and visit, the Dover Transport Museum.
Inconspicuously located in an industrial estate in the village of Whitfield, just beyond the perimeter of the main town, the approach to the transport museum is unprepossessing, but the looming shape of lets the traveller know that he has arrived and is in the safe company of like-minded enthusiasts. , incidentally, is not a statue of Canterbury’s martyred archbishop, but a 0-6-0 saddle tank locomotive built by the Avonside Engine Co. of Bristol in 1927. As with most of the museum’s exhibits, she survives as a tangible bond connecting the Kent of the past with the Kent of the present. She was built to serve at Snowdown Colliery, the Edwardian coal mine nine miles from Dover which, at 3,083ft., was the deepest in Kent. She was one of three built by Avonside to run on the mine’s standard-gauge railway, her sisters and , but she was retired in poor condition in 1971, and all traces of the railway were removed when the colliery closed in 1987.
