The Ball Clay Mine Museum at Norden on the Isle of Purbeck has a Manchester Gate on the inclined two foot gauge track it has built as a part of a reconstruction of what a ball clay mine would have looked like.
A short stretch of horizontal tunnel, using authentic iron hoops recovered from actual Isle of Purbeck workings, leads to a (possibly one in ten gradient) rope-hauled incline to the above-ground stage where the clay would have been tipped from the two-foot gauge mine trucks into either road transport or larger gauge wagons to be taken to the processing plant.
The Manchester Gate is partway up the incline, and consists of a steel box section some four feet long, six inches high and two inches deep held horizontal in vertical jaws at the top of two approx 18 inches high steel stanchions, one either side of the two foot gauge rails.
Since actual mine trucks are used on the horizontal area of the above-ground stage to show how they were tipped into larger forms of transport, the gate is not just for show. It would indeed stop a runaway truck from escaping right down the incline and on further.
Other mining equipment at the site includes a miners’ lamp charging board (not working), an authentic miners’ tally board with tallies, an electric winch, various trucks and hopper wagons, a Ruston diesel loco, and a hundred yards or more of surface track.
Most incongruous is a two foot gauge steel framed wooden panelled open truck bearing the faded initials SNCV (seemingly Societé Nationale de Chemins de fer Vincinaux – Belgium’s narrow gauge, albeit metre gauge, secondary railway network) and prominently BRABANT (a town in Belgium) in black on a very modern looking plastic strip. Perhaps the truck was used in the metre gauge system’s Brabant workshops. It has exterior coil spring suspension.