A carriage which has not carried passengers for over 50 years has arrived at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. The teak bodied and panelled carriage, No. 3669, was built in 1930 by the Birmingham Railway Carriage & Wagon Company to a design of Sir Nigel Gresley, arguably Britain’s foremost locomotive and carriage designer.
The carriage, with four compartments, side corridor and guard’s van area ran throughout the 1930s, the Second World War and the austere 1950s until it was withdrawn from passenger-carrying service in the swinging 60s.
However, instead of being scrapped, it was earmarked to be part of a breakdown train and became a Riding Van at its new home depot at Healey Mills, near Wakefield. Gutted of seats and compartments and given a departmental number DE 320984, it was now part of the Chief Mechanical & Electrical Engineer’s departmental fleet and thereafter used in the breakdown train to attend derailments.
The years rolled by until July 1st, 1980 when it was finally withdrawn from service and put up for sale. It escaped being scrapped once more and initially went to Embsay on the Yorkshire Dales Railway. Little work was done, however, and in April 2002 it passed into the ownership of LNERCA committee member, Marcus Woodcock and moved to a farmer’s premises off the beaten track near Driffield. Here, Marcus and his two fellow coach preservationists, Roy Lingham and Stuart Hiscock, painstakingly rebuilt the carriage, replacing the missing fittings and restoring the vintage carriage back to its original varnished teak condition. In the last year, Nick Stringer has contributed considerably, allowing rapid progress to be made.
Being built in 1930, the carriage dates from the early period of the London & North Eastern Railway and, as such was extensively fitted with vertical match boarding in the corridor. Much of this was recovered from coach bodies sold to Aberdeenshire farmers who bought carriage bodies from BR’s Inverurie Works, north of Aberdeen, for use as animal feed stores and horse boxes. The LNERCA volunteers make regular sorties to Scotland in search of old carriage bodies from which spares are bought from their owners.
The carriage, now resplendent with 12 coats of varnish, and restored to museum standard, is expected to enter service later this year. Murray Brown, NYMR Trust Chairman and Founder of the LNER Coach Association, remarks: “With this vintage carriage being the last of its type, we have been looking forward to seeing it fully restored, and taking its place in the NYMR’s Teak Carriage set which is popular with the public and is often hauled by the railway’s flagship locomotive Sir Nigel Gresley. The public love carriages with old-fashioned compartments and this one complete with water-colour paintings of scenes around Yorkshire will certainly not disappoint. Even the seating material, moquette, has been researched and especially woven to the identical pattern from when the carriage was built 83 years ago.”
The L.N.E.R. Coach Association www.lnerca.org was formed in 1980 as an informal group with the aim of preserving and restoring L.N.E.R. coaches to form a teak liveried train for use on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, Britain’s most popular heritage railway.