With a fairly depressing weather forecast, organisers of the ‘Tram Day’ at Crich on Saturday 10th September have made a few tweaks to the previously advertised programme of events. The main photographic line-ups will still take place as planned, although it is possible that some vehicles may not appear if the weather is too bad. The main changes concern the vehicle allocations for the day’s service.
With rain expected in the morning, most of the serviceable open cars will now only be used in the afternoon, meaning that some of the enclosed cars scheduled to run only in the afternoon will be brought out earlier than planned. The full provisional list of trams due to run is now as follows:
All day service trams – Blackpool 40, LCC 106, MET 331, Leeds 345, Sheffield 510, Blackpool 762 & London 1622
Morning only trams – Chesterfield 7, Blackpool 167, Leeds 180, Oporto 273 & Leeds 399
Afternoon only trams – LUT 159, Blackpool 166, Blackpool 236, Liverpool 869 & Glasgow 1068
In addition the Access Tram, Berlin 223 006-4 will be available for two timetabled journeys at 1130 and 1430.
The highlight of the day is likely to be a line-up of works vehicles on the depot fan between 1030 and 1130, featuring Oporto C65 making a unique appearance at Crich before heading to Beamish Museum. There will be further photo opportunities with the Chestefield and Porto fleets from 1430 to 1530, and C65 will be formally handed over to Beamish at 1500.
The previously advertised morning display at Town End featuring the two red Blackpool trams – Standard 40 and Toastrack 166 – has been rescheduled and is now expected to happen at about 1700. Instead, the three operational Leeds trams – 180, 345 and 399 – will be posed together at Town End at 0945 until 1015. Finally, the last service of the day should be London Transport 1622 making its final outing for a while ahead of its withdrawal for workshop attention.
The event organisers are to be praised for altering the schedule without losing any key elements, and ‘Tram Day’ still looks set to be one of the highlights of the year for heritage trams. Don’t forget to look out for our LIVE coverage on Facebook if you can’t be there in person.
Still looks good. I’m looking forward to tomorrow
What a great day. Apart from one slight issue which marred the morning the day was truly excellent. The staff in the book sale were totally bonkers and really made visiting the sale enjoyable, especially the lovely lady who went the extra mile to let me use my card as I found far too much stuff to buy! The line ups were basic but very welcome and it was nice to be able to get right up to C65 – a great gesture on behalf of Crich to display it on its way North. I wonder if it could come back for a play? A nice selectoion of cars ran and another well done for being brave enough to stick a few open cars out all day and for making the effort of getting the others out when the weather eased off. I didn’t see the official handovers and I was told early on that they thought they were cancelled. Overall a great day and very pleased I went.