Despite not hosting a special event for the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, Sunday 4th and Monday 5th May saw a bumper tram service at Crich Tramway Village, with a very impressive total of eleven different trams used over these two days. Sunday was a particularly good day with seven cars operating, including Oporto 273 for the first time since 2010!
With plenty of crews available and a promising weather forecast on Sunday 4th May, efforts were made to run extra trams with the ever-popular open cars dominating the day’s output. For most of the day six trams were running, these being Chesterfield 7, Southampton 45, Blackpool 166, Blackpool 236, Oporto 273 and Berlin 3006. However, later in the day Blackpool 40 also entered service to provide extra capacity. This day was also unusual as the single deckers in service outnumbered the double deckers, something which doesn’t often happen at Crich, but with so many trams out the need for high capacity cars was reduced. Star of the day was probably Oporto 273; this tram had recently passed through the works and is now back in the running fleet for the first time since an ill-fated visit to Blackpool in 2010.
The following day was almost as good with cars 7, 40 and 45 all in action again, and this time they were joined by double-deck cars Leeds 399, Glasgow 1068 and London Transport 1622. Although this wasn’t part of an advertised event, visitors on this extended weekend were certainly treated to a fantastic selection of trams in action – a far cry from many days when last season when the museum struggled to find enough volunteers to run more than two trams. Hopefully this wasn’t a fluke, and whilst it would be unreasonable to expect so many trams in service on normal weekdays, it would certainly be great to have more days like this at Crich!