More progress with carriage and wagons on a pleasant autumn day down the Apedale Valley. A Young Members project has been to refurbish one of the ex-Woodhead flat wagons. This, it will be recalled, was described previously as the Tudor Class. It has been decided that this will be used to convey various generators around the site for next weekend's Halloween event - this gave a considerable impetus to finishing the wagon. After all, it doesn't do to keep the undead waiting. Meanwhile, the Trench Tramway wagon is now basically complete. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, this wagon is typical of the vehicles which would have been on the very "last mile" of the WW1 railway operations - on the bits where it was too dangerous, or the track was too light, to send a locomotive.
Finally, the ex- Ffestiniog coach continues to progress. The project team have been fighting a bit of a battle with the drawgear - it needed to be lowered to match our locos and reflect the use of different bogies. The drawbar will now emerge under the vehicle headstock, rather than through a "letterbox" in the end of the vehicle. The next stage is to start assembly the bogies, and then we can find out if it will fit through the shed doors again!
