We saw the last of our delivery vehicles yesterday.  The old trams have the winter off and start work again in March.  From now until then local deliveries will have to be made by car as we have no handy bus service.  We do try and do our bit to stop global warming.

    Unexpectedly the last two trams of the season did a parallel run from Ramsey to Laxey - that's the northern half of the line.  For those of you who don't know what a parallel run is, it means two trams running side by side going in the same direction.  One of them obviously has to use the line which trams travelling in the opposite direction would normally use.  Under normal working conditions this would be unsafe as the pair might meet a tram coming towards them.  As these two were the last trams of the season they knew there was nothing else on the line (and they'd checked by radio with the stationmasters of course) so the drivers thought they'd put on a show for enthusiasts.

    It was spectacular, despite the rain and oncoming night.

    In the photograph above, car 9, the illuminated tram, is running wrong line, and both are heading up the hill away from the senior partner who had just got off.  Of course, if a passenger wants to alight, then both trams have to stop if they are to stay in parallel.

    Waving from the back platform are the two conductors, Reuben in car 5 and Leslie in car 9.  Leslie also drives but was conducting for the last run.  We'll see them next year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Tholt y Will Glen (above) is the closest photograph we have of a rainforest, and much too beautiful to represent Amazon. Those of you who like Amazon should stop reading now because I fear that this is going to be a rant. We have been selling books through Amazon for nearly twenty years, since before we set up Loaghtan Books in fact.  We didn't like dealing with Amazon because we thought they were greedy; it's completely reasonable to charge commission but they take too much.  For example, our A Brief History of the Isle of Man retails at £12.95.  Amazon charges the customer £15.75 explaining that the additional £2.80 is for postage.  Not that we get anything for postage, Amazon keeps that.  Amazon credits us with £10.75 out of which we still have to take the postage, currently £4.16.   Briefly, the customer pays £15.75, Amazon gets £5.00, the postage is £4.16, we get £6.59.  Nevertheless we put up with getting only pennies more than half of the p...
Read more
Image
 Above is Dreemskerry Quarry in the snow.  It's just up the road from the office.  It's actually quite small but looks almost alpine here. No longer a working quarry it is occasionally used for motorbike trials and is also home to a colony of feral cockerels.  Their previous owner kept the hens, as they provide eggs, but the cockerels were non productive (no comments please, ladies) so were 'freed' (aka dumped) in the quarry.  The Isle of Man has no foxes so the birds seem to be doing quite well.  They do appear to have the occasional rowdy party, however, as we can sometimes hear crowing from the office.  Local residents are less than happy at the occasional wake-up call at five in the morning. The island gets very little snow as a rule, but, like most of the north of Britain, had its share today.  The office is sheltered from all but an east wind, but, as that's what it was, we came to work to find the windows plastered with stuck-on snow. ...
Read more
Image
Some blog posts are inconsequential or frivolous, but this one is serious. For 140 years horse trams have been clip-clopping up and down Douglas front.  They are unique.  No-one else in the world has such a survival - even the stables are original and the only working tramway stables left in the world.  And you can't find transport which is much more 'green'.  They've taken visitors and luggage to hotels, kiddies for rides, passengers from the MER at Derby Castle to the shops in town. Now they can't. Despite a Tynwald resolution that they should continue the full length of the promenade, the track still starts at Derby Castle but has been truncated at the bottom of Broadway (about half-way along).  At one stroke, the horse trams have stopped being a useful connexion between distant points - travelling from the north of the island we used them all the time - and become merely a plaything. The powers-that-be seem reluctant to put in place what Tynwald voted for, s...
Read more