Lottery grant for the Isle of Wight Steam Railway

The Isle of Wight Steam Railway has been awarded a £970,000 grant to provide a storage and display building, the total cost of the project will be approx £1.2M. The building will house coaches, locomotives, wagons and grounded bodies. The building will have 4 internal tracks and an additional track under a lean to on the side of the shed, each track will be capable of housing 4 bogie coaches.

The new building will have public access, this will allow much more of the collection be viewed by visitors. Part of the display will be a LCDR grounded body that is still at present in use as a chalet, it will remain unaltered.

The project will be a very important step forward for the railway, it will be our equivalent of Kidderminster carriage shed and Highley Engine house combined.

http://www.iwsteamrailway.co.uk/new...000-grant-to-isle-of-wight-steam-railway.html

 

Great news! Now if only The Heritage Lottery fund would also award a grant for the reinstatement of the rest of the Island's railways....... We could probably do it for a tenth of what are currently paying to subsidise India's space programme.

 

Fantastic news, wonderful to see the IoWSR forge ahead in the 'not sexy but necessary' work needed to maintain its gorgeous collection of proper vintage rolling stock.

 

"Most of the new Changing Trains building will be accessible to the public with a substantial investment of £100,000 being dedicated to new interpretation facilities"

....it may just be a little sexy too

The Isle of Wight Steam Railway - Heritage Lottery Fund Award £970,000 Grant to Isle of Wight Steam Railway

Regards

Pete

 

A wonderful dream - but coming back closer to reality how about the necessary point, groundframe & signalling changes to allow reconnection of the IWSR at Smallbrook Junction. If NR approval is forthcoming for operation of the steam railmotor might it be possible to see Calbourne & selected shadmates + some of the fantastic collection of passenger stock between Ryde (St John's Rd) & Shanklin again? - a preservation era holy grail?

 

It is indeed great news, Woodern bodied coaches deteriate very quickly when not stored under cover, the I.O.W steam railway is a jem , and can only get better, Steam to Shanklin, not just yet, but it will happen one day the franchise expires in 2017, and theres no guarentee that Stagecoach will want to retain it, that could open the door to a partnership that could see Dmu working with steam specials during the holiday season running St Johns to wooton or Shanklin , or both

 

Indeed yes - but what's more important to you and me, the undercover bit or the visitor centre bit

 

At the end of the day, the passenger does not sit on the footplate for a ride, so it really is important that carriages get the attention they deserve. The IOWSR saw the need years ago (as well as the fact that I don't think any Mk. 1 set foot on the island in any case!), and what we are now seeing are the spectacular results of their determination and enthusiasm. I think it is one of the few railways where the carriages have equal billing to the motive power.

 

Indeed we did make some strategic decisions in the 70s. We were faced with trying to run the railway with six carriages of which only four were serviceable. In addition we had very limited resources. So we made two policy decisions:

First we would not buy "nearly ready to run" mark 1s. The 57' long, air braked, side buffered and screw coupled class 501 trailer cars were being withdrawn at the time and could have been considered to be ideal. But we realised that if we bought some of these then the maintenance effort needed to keep these in traffic would have meant that we would not have been able to maintain the Brighton & Chatham vehicles.

Secondly we had already started collecting grounded bodies. We decided that Southern PMVs would make ideal chassis and bought an initial batch of 10 over a period of a year straight out of traffic from Basingstoke. This gave us the basic material for our four wheelers.

These two decisions have lead to a great deal of hard work, but the result speaks for itself.

 

Work has started! The contractors have been on site for one week, during that time all of the bases have been dug out and most are concreted. The steelwork is due for delivery in a couple of weeks time, by the end of October the framework should be complete.

Very good progress so far:smile:

 

Excellant Gary, is there any chance of some pictures please?.

In anticipation

Chris:

 

I did take a few photos today in the pouring rain Chris, they are loaded onto the computer at work. I will post a couple tomorrow that will show the progress and the scale of the building

 

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A couple of progress photos of the work taken on the 23/09/12. The current weather situation is not helping with the site rapidly becoming waterlogged! The stone that has been laid is to allow the builders better access in all weathers.
I will try to post a couple of photos each week to show the progress.

 

Thank you Gary, it is nice to see the progress.

Kind regards
Chris:

 

The shot with the carriage in the background really brings home quite how big the building will be. I hadn't appreciated this until now.
Thanks for the pictures Gary

 

The shed will hold the equivalent of 20 bogie coaches, not that we have that many! It is not just the working coaches that will live in the shed, W24, W8, W11 and others will be out of the weather when not in use. Many of the grounded bodies will be protected from the elements as will some of the heritage wagon fleet.
Do not forget the building will have full public access, so that more of the railways jewels will be on display instead of hidden away.

 

I think this is really foresighted. Those railways that have taken the trouble to save, restore and look after older coaches will I think have a definite 'edge' in years to come, especially over smaller projects that have relied on Mk 1's.

I don't dislike Mk 1's, on the contrary they are the coach of my youth, I went out of my way to travel on the last Mk 1 BSK in service (on the North Wales coast - already about 10 years ago!) but far too few of them are original or in good condition, and unless you are very well organised they are very difficult to overhaul.

 

Indeed. I think too many lines have relied on there being a ready supply of Mk 1s available from the "big" railway, which can be bought cheaply, run for a few years to extract their residual value, and then exchanged for another. That is no-longer the case, so railways will have to get used to the cost and complexity of restoring and overhauling Mk 1 carriages. I supect some small lines that will struggle to be able to keep sufficient stock in service. It's one thing for a line with a requirement for perhaps 20 vehicles to put one through a thorough overhaul every year so you achieve a turnover rate of about 5% of your fleet undergoing a thorough overhaul every year. But for a small line needing perhaps four or five coaches, it will be feast or famine, depending whether they need to restore a coach in a given year or not - and whether you have set aside the £100k or so cost it will take.

I also think we will see an increasing number of carriage shed projects as railways realise the extra wear and tear that can be saved by keeping carriages dry and secure when not in use. Certainly even at £3million (which included the land purchase), the Bluebell's SP carriage shed was reckoned to have a very quick return on investment when set against the maintenance costs saved. So I look forward to my next visit to the IoW with interest. Hopefully they can get some of the very ancient 4 wheelers under cover and ensure that there will still be some bodies to restore 20,30 years hence!

Tom

 

On the SVR, where we are lucky enough to have a gigantic carriage shed, easily one of the most far-sighted of developments over the years, it is remarkable to see how the rolling stock just doesn't seem to deteriorate from one year to the next. I know that a large part of that is the maintenance conducted by the carriage works but it is still noteworthy.

 

I'd have to disagree with some of the previous posts. I can't think of many lines where there was a turnover of Mk1s, apart from the Mid Hants, where they seem to have gone from a Mk 1 fleet to Mk 2s and then back to Mk 1s. As far as I'm aware the NYMR, SVR, Swanage and WSR all accumulated big Mk 1 fleets but have only disposed of a few along the way, a couple of other significant collections, the GWSR and Llangollen seem to have been huge at one point but thinned down more recently.

Most lines did not have much choice in the matter - by the time they were established there were no usable pre-BR coaches available and the choice was to restore heavily stripped ex-Departmental stock or buy ready to run Mk1s (or at least examples that could be easily restored using spares available from scrapyards). Fortunately there were those willing to take on the ex-departmentals and earlier grounded bodies, and now that there are no more Mk 1s around we are gradually seeing more effort put intot the earlier stock, but there's plenty of it to go around in sidings up and down the country. Hopefully more people will begin to realise that the newly restored Birdcage or Thompson coach they are enjoying a ride in was once a much derided "hen hutch", the subject of magazine editorials calling for it to be disposed of in the name of tidiness.