TWO years’ of careful planning came together over the weekend when a piece of Swindon’s railway heritage was transported to its new home in Didcot.

The huge 30-foot-long control panel at Swindon Panel Signal Box – closed earlier this year after 48 years controlling trains - was expertly manoeuvred out of its home and onto a lorry to travel to Didcot so it can be preserved for future generations.

Network Rail sold the panel for £1 to the Swindon Panel Society, who plan to wire the panel up to a computer simulation to mimic real-life train movements, enabling visitors to the popular Didcot Railway Centre to try their hand at signalling trains.

The panel will be part of a wider attraction centred on signalling and train control in a new purpose-built building in the heart of the popular Railway Centre.

On Saturday morning the team of volunteers were on site to oversee the panel’s final journey. The panel had been raised up to the appropriate height and position on previous weekends, and the runway out onto the roof had been prepared on Friday.

Danny Scroggins, of the Swindon Panel Society, said: “Shortly after 8am, right on time, the lifting harnesses were applied to the frame and, after more checks, the hi-ab took the strain and whole panel was inched off the roof. Once confident, the panel was lifted over the barriers that were around the edge of the roof and down onto the trailer.

“It was a momentous occasion for all those present and everyone in the Society following on Facebook and Twitter that the day we had waited so long for had finally arrived.”

Shortly afterwards the lorry set off for Didcot where it was then loaded into a waiting wagon in the DB Fuel Point yard by P&D for onward transit by rail before it was set-back into the Railway Centre.

Danny said: “The panel then spent a lovely afternoon in the sunshine that it would have seen so little of in its life before, sitting alongside the Demonstration Line platform. Later that afternoon it was shunted into the locomotive shed for under-cover storage until later this week.”

Meanwhile, at Swindon, the team worked hard to restore the building to better-than-original condition. All manner of debris of the closure, decommissioning and the volunteers’ removal of the panel was removed, picked up, hoovered, replaced, squared up and secured.

At Didcot, work continued in the afternoon in preparing the building for the acceptance of the panel – which is expected on Thursday.

But work on the project is far from over – not least because now the volunteers need to get the panel into its new building and settled in. The interior of the new building is a long way off completion, and then requires to be fitted with an education and interesting set of displays and equipment. The panel also needs wiring up so that it can work as realistically as the real thing.

Swindon Panel Signal Box was opened in 1968 and took over an area controlled by thirty-two mechanical lever-frame signal boxes, representing the contemporary modernisation of the signalling system.

After months of work, Network Rail finally closed the signal box at Swindon at 1.10am on Saturday, February 20. Trains are now signalled from the state-of-the-art Thames Valley Signalling Centre in Didcot, bringing to an end 150 years of railway signalling in Swindon.