{"id":15186,"date":"2016-08-16T22:10:36","date_gmt":"2016-08-16T21:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=15186"},"modified":"2016-08-16T22:10:36","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T21:10:36","slug":"douglas-horse-tram-set-for-wales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=15186","title":{"rendered":"Douglas horse tram set for Wales?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the auction of six surplus tramcars from the Douglas Bay Horse Tramway imminent, this development continues to dominate the news as a number of interested parties come forward to inspect the trams and consider potential options for their future. It has come to light that the Welshpool &amp; Llanfair Light Railway have shown interest in a tram with bulkhead crossbench car <strong>37 <\/strong>believed to be their first choice.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Representatives of the railway paid a visit to Douglas on 16th August, when they were shown around Strathallan Depot and allowed to view the six trams being offered for sale. If they make a successful bid, that would only be one hurdle overcome, as permission would need to be granted by the relevant authorities to release the car from the Isle of Man and ship it to mainland Britain. If this happens, <strong>37 <\/strong>would presumably be destined for operation on the railway, perhaps as a carriage behind steam locomotives as after all, a horse tram and a railway carriage are not all that different in design and purpose. This would entail re-gauging the tram, which has met with vocal opposition from the Manx Electric Railway Society who refer to it as &#8216;butchering&#8217; it. Of course, many preserved trams have been converted to run on a different gauge of track over the years but this particular case is likely to be controversial, especially as so few trams have ever left the island and be re-homed elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>It is believed that other groups were also escorted around the depot on the same date, but it has not been revealed who they were and whether anyone else has shown serious interest in acquiring any of the other cars. Hopefully none of the trams will end up being broken up; indeed considering their age and relatively small size, housing them should be relatively straightforward compared to the many Blackpool trams which were successfully re-homed not so many years ago (albeit with some of them subsequently going back home!), and of course in this case the number of trams being offered up for grabs is considerably less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the auction of six surplus tramcars from the Douglas Bay Horse Tramway imminent, this development continues to dominate the news as a number of interested parties come forward to inspect the trams and consider potential options for their future. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=15186\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15187,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15186\/revisions\/15187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}