Boasting excellent facilities with its bustling tea-rooms bursting with tasty treats and walls dripping with railway memorabilia, cute little souvenir shop and adjacent ice-cream stall and vast picnic area and with rides running every few minutes on two separate railways around a secluded pocket of green, lush Surrey countryside, this railway offers the ultimate in family pleasure and entertainment.

This is truly a railway run with passion, imagination, unrivalled devotion and overwhelming expertise! We were absolutely delighted to find ourselves in the company of throngs of other excited visitors all sharing the same sense of eager anticipation and pure, unadulterated joy at the prospect of being able to ride the 1800 feet of gorgeous woodland tracks, astride a selection of immaculately created steam, diesel and electric locomotives.

The ambience here was tremendous; a combination of open-air exhilaration, olde-worlde railway nostalgia and the warmest of welcomes from the dedicated and professional team of volunteers.

Indeed, the views from aboard the trains on both the ground and elevated tracks are delightful. Such a hive of ferrovial activity - a real feast for the eyes!  Many of the trains are replicas of locomotives from a bygone age and whatever your taste in trains there is literally something for everybody here; ranging from ‘Douglas’ the chirpy little steam engine to the tiny but perfect ‘Class 50’ Diesel.

The Thames Ditton Miniature Railway also gives a distinct impression of housing ‘work in progress’. Constantly evolving and developing, The Malden and District Society of Model Engineers Limited, who operate the railway, are currently constructing a very large signal box, with 40 levers, capable of controlling every point and signal across the entire site and pin-pointing the location of every train at any given time – quite some challenge!

This expertly run railway constitutes a seamless fusion of work and play and with new engines currently being built behind the scenes we are sure that the society and its popularity will go from strength to strength.