Taff Vale 1911 Coach Arrives

Taff Vale Railway 3rd Brake No. 203

In 1911, on the Taff Vale Railway a serious accident took place near Abercynon. It was known as the Coke Ovens accident and involved a passenger train and a goods train colliding.

Two of the carriages in that train, numbers 203 and 266 were recovered, with the bodies partially destroyed. Their chassis, however, were salvageable and were sent to two different manufacturers for replacement bodies to be added. No. 203 emerged from Gloucester Railway Carriage & Wagon works in 1912, as the prototype for the new high roof style of coaches of the TVR.

This combination of an Edwardian body on a Victorian chassis ran in the Welsh Valleys for another 16 years, before being pensioned by the Great Western Railway, who had subsumed the TVR in 1923. The chassis was presumably scrapped. But the body was sold to become living accommodation on a small holding south of Bath. It served this purpose for many years, before being downgraded to a cattle feed store. Its resting place was beside the Limpley Stoke to Hallatrow branch line, near Combe Hay. Many of you will have seen the 1950’s film that was made on this stretch of line, ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ (if you haven’t, it comes highly recommended for a ‘tea and crumpets’ afternoon on a drizzly day). In this film, the passenger accommodation was cobbled together from a low wagon carrying a coach body, borrowed from the person who lived in it. We like to think that TVR 205’s body could have been the inspiration for this.

In 1973, twenty or so years after this film was made, the coach body was discovered by a group of volunteers for the Somerset & Dorset preservation site in Radstock.

A plan was hatched to recover and restore this coach body. Work continued at Radstock until the project was forced to re-locate to the West Somerset Railway. Rather than move the coach there, the group, based in Bath, looked for a more easily accessible site and one was found in the goods yard of Frome Station. Following much research a suitable chassis was located at a Ministry of Defence site. A purchase was made of a Great Eastern Railway bogie coach chassis, complete with wood-centred Mansel Wheels – the type the coach would have had when complete. The chassis was rather too long for the coach, but help was at hand, as the wagon repair company, Marcroft, was still active in Radstock.

The chassis was taken to their works and was shortened accordingly. Concurrent with this, was our developing relationship with the Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum’s director, Dr. Stuart Owen Jones. We exchanged research material and guided him to other Welsh origin coach bodies for his collection.

With the chassis complete, the body was moved once more, from Frome back to Radstock, and united with its new wheels. It was then transported over the Severn to its new home in Cardiff for further restoration. The three remaining owners were themselves undergoing life changing pressures – two were getting married and the third was moving to London. The coach was offered to and accepted by the Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum, where it stayed for a number of years.

And then came Cardiff’s regeneration of the docks. The museum had to pack up and move almost everything into storage and that is where the coach has been ever since.

The National Museum Wales (as it is now called) have agreed to the ESR having this coach and to restore it, as they see no opportunity to do so themselves.