You often hear about lorries hitting railway bridges and causing major delays to services but on Thursday 12th April a similar story occurred on the Seaton Tramway with a lorry causing damage to the overhead at Colyford road crossing. The lorry – which had a digger on the back causing it to be over height for the road – brought the wires down shortly before midday bringing a premature end to the day’s service.
As anyone who has visited the Seaton Tramway before will be aware there is a road crossing at the Colyton side of Colyford station which requires all trams to set the lights for the way ahead and obviously any vehicles travelling along the A3052 need to be under a certain height so as not to cause damage to the overhead. Unfortunately in this incident the driver of the lorry obviously wasn’t either aware of the height restriction or was unaware how high his vehicle was with the digger on the back which resulted in the wires coming down.
Seaton Tramway services were immediately halted with passengers taken to their respective starting points by coach. With repairs ongoing it wasn’t possible to run a service on Friday 13th April and despite hopes repairs would be completed within the day it has also been confirmed that no trams will run on Saturday 14th April.
With the school Easter Holidays coming to an end the suspension of the service isn’t well timed and all because a lorry driver didn’t seem to know what he had behind him.