The Ballarat Tramway Museum is chasing funding for the last pieces of its redevelopment to finish off the city's newest tourist attraction.
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With the construction of a new $1.8 million museum currently under way, the museum needs another $500,000 to fit out the new building and install tram tracks to connect its extensive collection.
The project has been 11 years in the making for the Ballarat Tramway Museum, with the construction of the new building funded entirely without government support.
Ballarat Tramway Museum president Paul Mong said the new museum would cater for thousands of tourists per year.
"We wanted a space where we could showcase our collection of trams but also artifacts as well, old photographs, footage, and also make it a bit engaging for the general public to use," he said.
"Over those 11 years, we've been busy trying to fundraise for the museum extension, for the museum display. Fortunately, we've been able to raise the funds to construct the building but we don't have any funds to fit the building out and also to run the tram tracks, which are very very important to connect the tracks into the new building."
Mr Mong said the tracks would allow the museum to link its collection and rotate its 15 trams on display.
"The whole idea of museum extension is to obviously provide a better visitor experience so we want to complete the full package so we want to obviously take our visitors on a tram ride, but also showcase our collection of artifacts and the history of Ballarat, so it's very very important that we do these tracks so we can achieve this," he said.
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Mr Mong said he hoped to receive some form of government support to put the finishing touches on the new building which he estimated would inject $3.5 million into the local economy.
"I'm very proud of our organisation to raise what we have now without any support from any forms of government. We've done an amazing job to raise what we have done and we're looking forward to further support to obviously cater for the thousands of tourists per year that we deliver to Ballarat," he said.
"We went through the community, so we've had a few philanthropic grants and also community grants and members that were able to raise the funding.
"One of the benefits of our organisation is not only that you can experience, you can look at it, you can hop on them, you can actually ride them so that's the difference compared to other museums around.
"It would be nice if we could get some support from any forms of government to achieve this."
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