West Somerset Railway heritage coach plan

Hi all I am sure someone will know exactly what I am on about here, but I read many moons agao about a plan on the West Somerset to recreate two sets of GWR coaches for the line.

Does any one know if this every happen?

 

10 coaches owned by the West Somerset Railway Heritage Trust but limited progress towards a train. See: https://www.wsrht.co.uk/heritage-carriages-project/

 

I believe that Sheerings Yard at Wiliton has transferred from The WSRA to The WSR. There are plans for the WSRSHT to build a shed to house said coaches. How this all works out I have no idea.
I also understand that the WSRA are wanting to build a shed at Norton Fitzwarren.

 

It was a hopelessly optimistic plan from the outset, in terms of both costings and timescales, the best thing they could do to carry it forward would be to build a storage shed to at least stop what they have collected from getting any worse. Times have currently changed and whilst it used to be possible to get grants from HLF for restoration projects, nowadays it seems that any restoration work has to be a benefit on the side of another project and that is not easy to do. The sums of money involved are such that is difficult to raise them from donations, yet there are few sources of significant amounts from grants.

 

I guess that there are many "hopelessly optimistic" schemes in the railway heritage world, I can think of many. But if we did not attempt these, then we would be very much the poorer. When @Robin Moira White first ventured the project, indeed we did envisage enough coaches for two rakes. Robin scoured the country and we ended up with (I think) 12 coaches, but today we are a bit more circumspect and we envisage a single rake. And whilst it might have been ambitious, they are not making these vehicles anymore and it made sense to acquire as many as we could. We have had a professional survey done of the vehicles and we now know which ones we can realisitically work on and which ones may be more difficult.
You are right that covered accommodation is essential, not just to protect the coaches buit also to provide decent working conditions. If only it were as easy as you might suggest to acheive that. However, the plans for this are now coming to a conclusion. The funding is available and we hope to be able to properly protect the coaches in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, 6705 has been pretty much completed with the bellows added only a couple of weeks ago. We have a very competent and committed team and they have now moved onto 3639. Regular working parties are held every week. Much work has been done manufacturing new components. A full update was given in the most recent Journal published last week. Indeed many £100Ks are required, and we are looking at wider funding to up the pace.
Ian Coleby

 

Hi Ian. While I am not into GWR coach design wasn't the idea to have one toplight rake and the other a Churchward design set? And just out of personal interest how many of each type did you end up with?


Colin Rainsbury

 

Hi Colin, it was a rake of toplights and one of Collets. I have a list somewhere, I'll dig it out.
We did a series in the journal recently where we featured a different coach in each edition. But you would need to be a member to access the backnumbers online.

 

You could do a lot worse than taking a look at how the LNERCA has flourished over the years. Although its plans have not yet been fully realised as yet it has undergone steady and accelerating development over the years, accelerating in recent times. It has reached agreement with the NYMR to provide a teak train which the railway pays a hire fee for, in return for which the Association takes care of the maintenance of the interior and exterior of the coaches. It has a two-coach shed to use at Pickering for maintenance and an industrial unit capable of housing three coaches at an off-railway industrial park. At both locations work is undertaken by a mixture of contract staff and volunteers. The sad fact is that progress with volunteers alone is usually steady but very slow. The key is to generate income as there will be little change to be had from 250K per typical ex-departmental coach restored in this way. Meeting this funding need is a serious, ongoing and long term challenge but the rewards are great and as more coaches are returned to usable condition so the opportunities to hire them out grow. So far, it seems to be proving to be a very workable model. With a first coach finished and a second one underway, hopefully, the WSR group may be poiused to take the next step in its development.

 

Hi Colin, here is what we have:
2578 TK 1914 C32 DR TOPLIGHT American bogies.

3631 TK 1915 C28 WN TOPLIGHT

3639 TK 1908 C28 WN TOPLIGHT Restoration started. Ex ambulance car

3665 TK 1921 C28 WN TOPLIGHT

4546 TK 1925 C54 WN COLLETT. Bow-ended

5131 BTK 1928 D95 DR COLLETT. Bow-ended

5856 TK 1935 C67 WN COLLETT. ‘Tintern’ coach. Workshop/ store.

6705 BCK 1938 E159 WN COLLETT. Restored.

7538 BCK 1907 E83 WN TOPLIGHT American bogies. Tri-composite

7740 CK 1911 E88 DR TOPLIGHT Former training room at MD

9038 SL 1897 J5 BL Dean clerestory coach. Restored sleeper

 

Thanks Ian.

If I recall the idea was to have two seven coach trains sets, So I am not sure what missing Toplight model could be recreated if it still needed for the set.

As for the Collett set, again I am not sure what other Collett coaches you might want if the long term plan was to still run a seven coach set from what I can see you have two 3rd's and two brake 3rds, so may be a corridor 1st or 2nd class would be a good addition.

Did Collett ever produce a buffet/kitchen type carriage do you know

I have for my own amusment been looking on the vintage carriage trust website and I was surprised at just how many grounded Dean coach bodies are still about. Again a collection of say six or seven would make for a third set of heritage coaches in the long term.

 

I think this is one of those projects that was great in theory, but the railway, from the word go never committed any proper resources to it. As a bare minimum there should have been say 2 or 3 paid staff recruited to work on it full time to be able to make any real progress, together with a regular monthly budget for materials. A few inexperienced volunteers turning up on an occasional basis was never going to be able to deliver the desired result.

 

That really is a highly jaundiced view which shows a lot of ignorance about the project. As I said above, they are not making these things any more and you have to get them when you can. 6705 was largely done by a paid contractor at Crewe with a significant sum being devoted to that. It was then returned to Williton for finishing which involved more than we expected. If money was no object then what you say may be true but we all have to work within budgets.
There is no way I would classify our volunteers as inexperienced and we now have a professional, volunteer team who turn up for regular weekly (it might be twice a week or more) sessions. If you read the article in the current journal you will see the rapid progress being made on 3639. Things can always be done better and we are chasing further funding and expect an accommodation solution soon.
Ian

 

How’s things going with your piece of rolling stock?

 

Well to be fair Ian, 6705 arrived at the WSR 13 years ago (according to the carriage survey). According to the same survey some of the carriages have been at the railway since 07/08.
If it has taken 13 years to restore one carriage using contractors, it's going to take a very, very long time to restore the remaining nine using volunteers (especially if they are in worse condition than 6705 was).
If the trust/wsr were really committed to the project, they would've been applying for every grant under the sun and there would have been regular appeals in the railway press and even on NP.
A great project in theory, but perhaps on the wrong railway and perhaps led by the wrong people.

 

But what’d’ve happened to these coaches if the Trust hadn’t collected them when they became available? Presumably the previous owners had no great plans. There are still too many other unrestored pre-nationalisation coaches knocking around on other railways, not all owned by charitable trusts with funding for a shed in the pipeline.

 

We don't know. Maybe they'd have been restored, maybe they'd have been scrapped, or maybe sold on.
What we can say is, that up until this point, moving them to the WSR has not done them any good (with 1 exception).

 

Isn’t @ghost ’s comment a bit ‘glass half empty’? On the other hand we can say moving them to the WSR has not done ‘em harm; for at least two has done ‘em up & another in progress; and all owned by a Trust - with funding & plans for covered accommodation. So slower progress than any of us’d like but quite likely better prospects for many of these coaches than if they’d been left in random and scattered ownership.

 

I think that comment’s a little harsh, I know it’s very easy to have a pop at the WSR, but could you say for certain the whole rake would be in traffic by now even with it having the likes of say someone like Hugh McQuade, his team and the facilities at Kidderminster’s North Star works?

 

Not really but sadly accurate. Equally sadly there are similar situations elsewhere.

 

Not railway related, but obtaining items for future restoration is a sensible thing to do, even if they don't get restored straight away.
Our Museum has had these late 1920's buses in the collection since the late 1960's and they are still unrestored some 50+ years later, but were retained due to their comparative rarity - You just can't find things like that sitting around in farmyards/barns nowadays.



Whilst the Tilling-Stevens one may not have a future with us (we have more recently obtained parts to create an Eastern Counties Road Car open top double decker version), the other, an ADC, is likely to be retained until it can be restored. One big advantage was that for most of those 50+ years the buses in question were stored undercover, not easily done with the equivalent railway rolling stock.

Once the decision is made to get on with the restoration work, it's just down to money and manpower to transform something like this.....



...to this, in the space of 6 years.......