Crich again is the location for this edition of “Picture in Time”.
The volunteer crew take a seat on the bench at Town End as they wait until its time to depart up the line to Glory Mine in this shot at the Crich Tramway Village showing Blackpool Toastrack 166 – the only surviving member of this class of tram.
166 was built in 1927, one of a batch of six trams built for Blackpool Corporation and also one of the last Toastrack type tram to be built in the UK. To show how designs rapidly change it was just six years later that a “Luxury Toastrack” was built for Blackpool, this was what we now more commonly call the Boat Cars and was considered the height of streamlined design at the time and a far cry from what the traditional Toastrack gave.
The tram was withdrawn from front-line service in 1945 and after storage was converted into a special television tram with it used to carry cameras to film the annual autumn illuminations. It remained used for this purpose until 1965 and then after another period of storage was donated to Crich in 1972. A two year restoration followed and it was then operational between 1974 and 1998. A further period of workshop attention then came and it returned to use in 2004.
Photograph by John Moore