Founded by local man, the late George Cushing, it is now known for the scale of its collection of steam engines, mechanical organs and fairground rides, and its annual Christmas spectacular show, which draws over 100,000 people to the Norfolk countryside.

To Cushing, it was "as though the crown jewels were being sold for scrap", and he began to buy up redundant steam engines, storing and then restoring them at Laurel Farm in Thursford, where he had worked as a boy and now owned.

Thus, in the early 1970s Cushing opened his museum in what was then a series of old farm sheds, and would personally tour the audience between exhibits, most often dressed in a countryman's flat cap, tweed jacket and muffler over baggy jumper, trousers and gumboots.

There is also a 19th-century gondola merry-go-round which was built in the Norfolk factory of Frederick Savage, decorated with carved heads depicting Queen Victoria and her family, including the German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

One of the mechanical organs in the collection, a Wellershaus, was seen and heard in the Dad's Army television episode Everybody's Trucking, originally aired on 15 November 1974.