Rolling Stock For Sale

How many of the "project impossible" or cannibalised locos are privately owned, rather than owned by a larger group of members or a trust?

The financial and practical capabilities of the owner will have a huge impact on whether restoration is possible or it will simply be left to rust after the initial excitement of the purchase.

 

The sad reality is that the Ian Allan generation are dying out and many things which were purchased for scrap value never had any prospect of restoration. How often do we see the references to linear scrapyards and spreading limited resources too thinly on here? It was always inevitable that many items would slowly deteriorate in the open air to the point where they became both an eyesore and a hazard. Better that some railways are recognising this and developing logical strategies to tidy their sites to be more attractive to the paying public rather than creating a historically correct but unattractive Colonel Stephens appearance of redundant items.

 

If the linear scrapyards disappear then what will future generations have to restore ?

Better to find [undercover] storage off-site - unfortunately, that option costs money to operate and the £££ to move items.

 

I would foresee smaller numbers of volunteers, so the future could be restoration (or re-restoration) or current stock.
While it might be idealistic to have multiple sets of carriages reflecting the history of line X or company Y, I think a sense of realism has to kick in and the restoration, storage, maintenence, insurance etc of a large number of carriages may not be tenable for most railways.

 

Perhaps any of the hundreds of carriages currently in use when they come around for attention? As has been mentioned in several other places even the stalwart Mk 1 is now getting to an age where an overhaul is very labour intensive and expensive. I'd be interested to see if there are any railways who in light of this, chose to start sidelining them to concentrate the efforts on more vintage stock. Just thinking out loud, but if there was ever going to be a time where we had all this stuff restored at once, surely it was going to be before there was a general shortage of volunteers?

Also it doesn't seem very fair or well thought out to criticise the Ffestiniog with the benefit of our 2023 hindsight. If you think about it for a moment, the alternative would be to leave it all to sit in the sea air while you have even less cash on hand to do anything with it. Obviously I was quite happy to see Welsh Pony restored, but how much of it was actually fit for re-use by the time the situation was right to restore/rebuild it?

 

We still have some LMS sleepers I think ...

Tom

 

Although I hate to see old carriages scrapped as much as anyone else, in the case of those two Maunsells, one had been openly up for disposal to any interested party for over thirty years without the remotest bit of interest being shown in it. The other had originally been acquired for spares, essentially with the intention of making one good coach from two poor ones; but again had been openly offered for disposal for a considerable period before hand. So it is one thing saying things should be stored, but the question is just for how long is that tenable? I'd also make the point that in the Bluebell's case, while there is always more that could be done, our fleet of operational non-Mark 1 carriages, our record of taking on complex carriage restorations and our proportion of the fleet that is stored under cover, would all stand up against any other standard gauge line in the country.

Tom

 

There doesn't seem to be any value in scrap either. Swanage has been quoted over £3000 for the EPB coach at Norden to be cut up and disposed of by a local scrappy.

 

I once got a free turntable like that.

I told the owner railway that we would dispose of it for them, free of charge.

It wasn't free for us of course. We spent a week dismantling it, then there was crane hire and transport.

 

Some of our working fleet of civils wagons are into their 3rd overhaul and redeck.
Averaging 18 years for new timbers in the deck.

 

If a heritage railway already has enough operational carriages, which would cost less to maintain than the scrapyard jobs to restore, why would they want to keep their linear scrapyard??

Future generations would be better employed keeping the existing fleet running than simply restoring another carriage which would push an existing runner into the scrapyard.

Getting volunteers to turn up at off-site storage to help with a restoration project may be a lot harder. They don't get any of the experiences of being at a working railway.

 

The problem is this many of those coaches in the " Linear Scrapyard" are not owned by the railway in question, they are privately owned, purchased years ago with the best intentions, but then the owner found it harder than they thought, so they lose interest, and the railway then years down the line, has no idea of the whereabouts of these owners, and has to spend time and money tracing them, or their relatives if in many cases they have passed on, and no one knew about this coach they purchased many years ago, and the railway can't remove it, sell it on, or scrap it, until they have traced, or attempted to trace the owner, Assuming they know who owns it in the first place,

 

It's not possible to generalise when it comes to the "linear scrapyards". The reasons that have been advanced for lack of restoration in previous posts may be true in some cases, in others it's more a question of limited facilities and/or having to take their turn in a queue. One thing is or sure, if there is a drive to scrap all unrestored carriages it will be the more interesting pre-BR stock that will suffern the most and our heritage railways will become all the more sterile and bland as Mk1s increasingly predominate. We have reached a point where more and more examples of pre-BR coaching stock are gradually being restored - let's not jeopardise that progress by scrapping the feedstock for future restorations.

 

I have read elsewhere that Car 89 is destined to become a tearoom somewhere in Cambridgeshire.

 

This place? https://www.carriagesofcambridge.co.uk/

 

No idea, Matt; the info I posted was all that there was.

 

Nothing to do with me, but the following BR vans are for sale on the Carriage Exchange website:
http://www.scpg.org.uk/B780331.html
http://www.scpg.org.uk/B784757.html
http://www.scpg.org.uk/B774977.html
http://www.scpg.org.uk/B854906.html
All based at Swanage Railway

 

I thought they were no more?
Dave

 

As seen in latest Traction Ads:

Epping Ongar are disposing of two carriages:
Mk2 BSO No. 9410; recently withdrawn from traffic. Tyres turned in 2016 but now on minimum thickness.
Mk1 RBR No. 1699; complete but unrestored.

Final chance for the Taylor & Hubbard 5ton crane with runner wagons before they go for scrap.

Contact Michael Drew for more information or to express interest: michaeld@eorailway.co.uk