1. On Bank Holiday Monday afternoon Blackpool 40 dewired on the Town End trolley reverser and a queue of trams soon built up. Click on the picture to enlarge it - how many familiar faces can you recognise?
2. Liverpool 869 blew its breakers between Wakebridge and Glory Mine just before 40 dewired. It was parked at Glory Mine until later in the day when Gary helped Lawrence Dutton and John Shawcross to retrieve it with Blackpool 717. It was subsequently checked over and returned to service by Saturday.
3.
John Shawcross, James Blythe and Martin Gurr.4. On Wednesday, Gary caught me in the act of taking a picture for this blog. Look carefully and you can even see the library key in my back pocket.
In reply to the comments:
I was at Town End when 40 dewired.
The dewirement happened between 15:08 and 15:11 and by 15:35, 40 had been evacuated and parked at Town End. At 15:36 Paisley 68 was picking up 40's passengers. By 15:38 Blackpool 2 and Sheffield 74 were ready for loading.
We must accept that from time to time there will be delays caused by minor incidents. Where I think we let ourselves down was by not explaining what was happening to our customers. There is no need for both the driver and conductor to stay with a stationary tram. They can be parked safely just as for a lunch break. The crews can than explain to customers what is happening and appologise for the delay. That way 20 minutes will pass quickly and the customers will appreciate our efforts to sort things out and to keep them involved.
the whole thing could have been avoided if the museum sorted their act out and fixed the depot crossover northbound. Instead of curtailing the tram service entirely, trams could have run wrong line to depot, thus avoding visitors getting angry... as i heard they did.
ReplyDeleteThere's a few thing sthat need pointing out.
ReplyDelete1- the points are going to be sorted out hopefully over winter.
2- as far as i'm aware there was no angry visitors, just few upset ones who wanted to just ride on trams.
3- as the workshop were already dealing with another defect and needed to see if the car was safe to move, it had to wait.
We could have stopped some trams at the depot crossover and sent them wrong line all the way to cliffside but this could not be done as there was only one inspector at town end at the time 40 did it's party piece.
The last thing is, the points could have been fixed if we had the money to pull the old ones out simply put a brand new set in. This isn't possible so we have to refurbish old ones.
After all this we did have 4000 visitors over the bank holiday and over 400 vintage vehicles in the two days.