Father Christmas took time out of his extremely busy schedule to make the first of three visits to Blackpool on Saturday 9th December, when the Heritage Tram Tours team operated the first of their 2017 ‘Santa Specials’. This saw a total of six historic trams grace the promenade – quite an impressive total for the winter period, indeed this compares quite favourably with the pre-upgrade era!
As is the norm at these events, Santa’s grotto was on board the illuminated Western Train 733+734 which spent the day stabled on the spare track near North Pier, although it did perform a single journey to Little Bispham and back in the late afternoon, offering passengers the chance to ride on the iconic trams for an additional charge. This year it was joined on the North Pier passing loop by Balloon 700, which was also stabled for the day acting as a gift shop selling heritage tram merchandise – the perfect stocking fillers!
The actual heritage service complementing Santa’s Train grotto was expanded this year with four trams running instead of the previous two, giving a fifteen minute service between Pleasure Beach and Bispham. Unsurprisingly all of the selected cars were heater-fitted, with ‘HMS Blackpool’ 736 joined by Brush Railcoach 630, Centenary car 648 and Balloon 717. It was particularly nostalgic to see a Centenary car running in OPO mode in December, along with a refurbished Brush car as these trams were often used on winter weekends in the recent past to boost the core service in the run-up to Christmas. Admittedly neither of these trams were probably very appealing to the main target audience of a Santa event – but it was a nice treat for the enthusiasts!
Sadly, passenger loadings were very poor indeed, suggesting that a four-car heritage service in December may well have been overly optimistic. However, reports suggest that Santa’s Grotto and the shop tram were well supported, suggesting that there is mileage in this event yet. Perhaps it may be worth merging the Santa Specials with one of the Winter Gold weekends in the future, or even extending the heritage service to Cleveleys in order to serve the town for the benefit of Christmas shoppers, resurrecting the old Cleveleys flyers which ran on weekends in November and December in years gone by? It should be noted that the heritage tram drivers need to be given regular work to do in order to keep their competence (if a driver does not drive a tram for a certain period they must be re-assessed before being permitted to drive again), and bearing this in mind there is clearly a place for this requirement to be used to create an event of some sort in the off-season.
Santa Specials will run again on Saturdays 16th & 23rd December with a four-car heritage service plus one trip with the Western Train expected on each day.
A busy scene on the Blackpool tramway on December 9th, and not a Flexity in sight! 700 and the Western Train are seen at North Pier with Brush car 630 heading south. (Photo by Rob Bray)