It has been confirmed that the tramway at Beamish Museum will be closed throughout January, February and March 2025 to allow some essential maintenance to take place. This follows on from the temporary shortening of the route since the start of December with trams only running Entrance-Foulbridge/Home Farm-Town at the present time.
There will be significant work taking place both on the tramway infrastructure and the tramcars themselves during the winter and as much of this would impact on the ability to operate a service it has been decided to suspend the tramway for the first three months of the year (at which time the museum is on limited opening days anyway). The Beamish Transport and Industry blog outlines the following tasks as due to be undertaken:
- Tramway rail welding (restoring the profile of worn rails, embedded into the street – external contractor)
- Tramway rail renewal in the Town East area (in-house)
- Tramway sleeper renewal (in-house)
- Tramway overhead line equipment insulator and span wire renewal (in-house)
- Tramcar maintenance and overhaul (in-house)
- Lineside vegetation/tree management including removal of overhanging tree limbs in proximity of the overhead (in-house)
The tramway has recently had two failures of BICC insulators – part of the overhead line equipment – which requires their replacement. The components which are being used to replace these are different lengths so the span wire also has to be replaced at the same time. This is the reason why the tramway is running part-route only to allow this work to get underway before the full closure, and to allow the tramway to be fully operational again at Easter 2025 (which is fortunately a late Easter next year).
Meanwhile, the trams themselves aren’t being ignored with the long-term overhaul of Gateshead 10 continuing to take place and remaining the main focus of attention. Newcastle 114 also requires repairs to its damaged controller, Sunderland 16 is scheduled to have its upper deck paintwork concluded and its likely that Sheffield 264 will receive the next mechanical overhaul (once 10 is back on its wheels).
Work on Lisbon 730 has been suspended for now with other priorities being completed first in the workshops.
With the Beamish Tramway not running for the first three months of 2025 and other heritage tramways in the British Isles out of their normal operating seasons or suspended for other reasons its means that after 1st January (when the East Anglia Transport Museum and Seaton Tramway will run) the winter and early spring will be another quiet one for heritage trams.
Saturday 14th December 2024 was a very busy day at Beamish with messages released on social media that the car parks were full and that they were introducing a one car in, one car out policy. That, of course, meant that inside the museum it was very busy and here we see a long queue at the Entrance as visitors wait to be allowed to board Sunderland 16, which at least will have a larger capacity to allow may of them to head down to towards the town.
Less capacity on board Oporto 196 and with the Entrance always a popular stop by the time it reaches Foulbridge/Home Farm its already full so the long queue seen here is likely to be mostly disappointed if they want a ride. (Both Photographs by Trevor Hall, 14th December 2024)