The late Victorian horse-drawn tram at the Dundee Museum of Transport was rescued from a garden summer house not far from my home.
It was deposited there after its working life came to an end, and there it remained until January 2014 when it was craned out and taken to the museum for restoration.
The Number 24 tram was one of the very last horse-drawn trams bought by Dundee Corporation prior to the introduction of electric trams in 1900, and it transported passengers between Dundee High School and Perth Road.
I was reminded of this when I heard of another remarkable survivor – a c1855 Great Western Railway carriage which appeared at Charterhouse Auctions of Dorset earlier this month.
Family owned for a century
This GWR First Class carriage had been family owned for around 100 years, having been towed behind a steam traction engine as travelling accommodation.
Up until a few years ago it was kept under cover in a makeshift store covered by brambles, with the family fixing corrugated iron sheets on the roof to protect it from successive winters on the outskirts of the New Forest.
Stamped with the Great Western initials
It had attractive arched windows and impressive iron-spoked wheels, and its oval bronze door handles, which were stamped ‘G.W.R. SWINDON’, provided the link to the Great Western.
It is not often in the auction world that prospective buyers are promised that the vendor will arrange to have branches cut from around an auction lot to ease removal!
A devil of a thing to value, but rare and ripe for restoration, the carriage sold on July 9 for a mid-estimate £6200.
