25th May 2010 – Leicester Trams

The mound in front of the saloon was hiding the rocker panel and it also revealed a pleasing sight... the saloon is resting on bricks, and the surrounding land turned out to be concrete! This would have been great if we had gone down the original route of using a crane to lift the saloon. As it turned out the wooden framed chassis was so badly decompsed that a crane is out of the question. We don't want to slice our car in two like a cheeswire!!

No spades this time! A JCB makes all the difference and makes light work of a big job.

The No.1 end platform is exposed from the rubble. Ok.. it's not pretty but it gives us a good template. We also discover brass fixtures and brackets still in situ which will come in useful.

The extreme right hand beam should be horizontal like the rest. Elderflower has caused real damage here and just shows how strong the foliage can be when left to its own devices. Over the years the Elderflower has grown upwards and forced the beam up to about 45 degrees! We used a chainsaw to removed the trunk section from the middle.

Some of the items we found in the rubble. A headlamp, 2 x dashboard support poles and the remains of the destination blind box.

We also took the opportunity to remove the last surviving window that wasn't broken. This was located adjacent to the sliding door on the bulkhead. When we removed the beading we found the car number stamped on the reverse of each piece and the colour of the wood.

We number the exposed roof blocks so when we strip the pieces we know where they all go back. We also have the use of roof sections from other two other Leicester trams that we discovered being used as fencing so if any of the support blocks are beyond re-use there are some others available to us. We can only number the blocks we can see at this stage but we'll do the rest as we expose them.

An angle we hadn't seen until the clearing was complete!

Leave a Reply