What’s hat they say about London buses? You wait ages for one to turn up and then two come! Well, it seems the same could be said of Glasgow trams as no sooner do we bring an update on the restoration of Glasgow 1245 at Summerlee then there is a major development at the East Anglia Transport Museum in work to bring Glasgow 488 back into use.
Ever since 488 returned to the UK from the Paris Transport Museum in March 2013 the tram has been in two halves with the lower and upper decks having been split during its time in France for storage purposes. But that is now part of its history as the excellent news to report on from Carlton Colville is that the upper deck has been lifted and put onto its lower deck once more – marking Glasgow 244×2, Glasgow 488 once more!
The lower deck saw a lot of restoration work take place at the Ffestiniog Railway’s Boston Lodge works after its repatriation, but the upper deck was not worked on in Wales with attention only turning towards it after it was moved into the East Anglia Transport Museum’s main depot from August 2024. Over the past 15 months or so work has been underway to rebuild this deck, replacing parts which were removed during its initial transport to France to make it fit on the ship.
This has now progressed sufficiently to allow the huge milestone of the two decks being put back together. To allow this to take place, the upper deck was moved back to the new West Depot and then a crew from Advanced Lifting came to the museum to lift upper onto lower on 25th November 2025.
This all went without a hitch and the tram is now back as one once more. Work will now continue on the tram’s restoration, but this is a major step forward to seeing the Standard Car running in the UK once again.
- And that’s not all that the East Anglia Transport Museum have been up to in recent days either! Amsterdam 474, last ran 2023, has been undergoing an overhaul in the West tram depot and this has now progressed to the stage of a full repaint as work on the tram comes towards an end.