A restoration company that goes against the grain
Hidden away in Northumberland is a small firm that specialises in turning unusual rolling stock from lost causes into immaculately restored treasures that question some deeply held railway preservation presumptions – Stanegate Restorations and Replicas.
Perfection is a funny thing. For lots of us, it’s beading water gently running down perfectly polished cylinder cladding as the sun and steam start to warm up. But for a certain breed of preservationists, perfection looks like a shining brass slotted screw, exactly lined up with the varnished grain of a Victorian carriage. Thankfully, there’s an obscure company in a tiny Northumbrian town that caters specifically for those whose pulse quickens at the sight of 150-year-old carriages gleaming like the day they were created.
Stanegate Restorations and Replicas might not be one of the big names in preservation, but if you haven’t heard of the Haltwhistle-based craftsmen (and women) then it’s fair to say that you will have seen their work, and probably travelled in it. They have been slowly but continuously building their reputation for tackling some of the most intricate and obscure restorations that railway preservation can offer.
Welsh Highland revival
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the firm was borne out of a passion for vintage rolling stock, but it was a long way from Northumberland.
The team behind Stanegate can all trace their love for carriages back to North Wales – the Ffestiniog Railway to be precise. One of that team is Sara Shrives. Her father worked at the Hunslet Engine Company, and she took over from Stanegate founder Ian Yates upon his retirement a couple of years ago.
“I was a guard on the FR. I spent a decade or more ‘breaking’ carriages and was told I needed to learn how to mend them,” says Sara. “Then I got involved in a group that met once a month and started to learn about woodworking. A lass of my age didn’t get to do woodwork at school!”
The late start in woodworking doesn’t show though, as Sara could easily regale even the most knowledgeable wooden vehicle restorers for hours now, in between memories of the Ffestiniog during the early 1980s, of course.
It would be 2006 though before the team’s love of vintage carriages was transformed into a business, and in a slightly awkward way, as their first project was a carriage from a narrow gauge railway in Porthmadog; but perhaps not the one that immediately springs to mind…
It was around the height of the acrimony between the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland sides of town, as the FR-backed reconstruction of the famous route from Dinas to Porthmadog was well under way. So, for a team associated with the Ffestiniog to be working on a carriage for the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway side was “a bit complicated”, according to Sara. Perhaps it was just as well that the team had chosen an industrial site adjacent to the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway route on the edge of Haltwhistle to find a home.
That first carriage was a restoration in its truest sense. Former Welsh Highland Railway buffet car No. 10 had been cut clean in half when it left railway use to become a summer house. The painstaking reconstruction reused as much of the remaining timber as possible, to such an extent that most people who now travel in it at Gelert’s Farm
I spent a decade or more ‘breaking’ carriages and was told I needed to learn how to mend them
will probably have little understanding of just how far gone the carriage was.
Almost as soon as their first carriage from Stanegate was complete, the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway came back for another. This time, it was a replica of a carriage built by the Ashbury Carriage & Iron Company in 1893. The original was constructed for the predecessor to the Welsh Highland, the North Wales Narrow Gauge Railways, and although it was converted to make it suitable for the Ffestiniog Railway loading gauge so that it lasted into the 1930s, it didn’t survive into preservation.
The new No. 9 was constructed as a faithful replica of the original from a single outline drawing, as not even a general arrangement diagram was available. In keeping with the NWNGR tradition, Sara remembers that the order form for the replica simply stated, “please supply one carriage”.
“I think it might have been what they’d said to Ashbury back in 1893!” Sara adds.
The replica was completed in 2010 and still forms part of the fleet on the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway now, it has even made a fleeting return to its former haunts in the Aberglaslyn Pass with fellow WHR veteran Russell.
New territory
Although that first project was something pretty familiar, it wasn’t long before the team diversified somewhat, including lifeboat restoration. On dry land (just), the team were also responsible for construction of a new car for the cliff lift at Saltburn.
With a well-equipped workshop, it wasn’t long before word had spread beyond Welsh narrow gauge circles.
The Bowes Railway was one of the first standard gauge customers. Three waggons (note the spelling on this 1820s railway) had every timber component replaced while the steelwork was refurbished. The most notable of the batch was the Kibblesworth drift bogie, a vehicle that was semi-permanently attached to a rope and used to shunt waggons into and out of the coal loading screens at Kibblesworth. It is a unique survivor of a technology that pre-dates locomotives but continued in everyday use well into the 1970s.
That led to work on another survivor linked to the earliest days of iron and steel rails – Stockton & Darlington Railway carriage No. 179, which was with Beamish at the time. Despite its rather crude form, it actually dates to the 1850s and was sold on for private railway use in the 1880s, after which it gained its nickname of the Forcett carriage. Although it had been restored in 1975, it required a rather substantial body and chassis restoration. It became the first of several standard gauge carriages to be transformed at Stanegate.
The project that Stanegate is probably best known for now is the Knotty Heritage Train. The North Staffordshire Railway rake, based at the Foxfield Railway, is currently three carriages long, all of which have been restored at Stanegate. Four-compartment first No. 127 was the first of the fleet, dating from the late 1870s or early 1880s.
“The gentlemen who showed us around were a bit nervous – they said, ‘Can it be done?’ We said, ‘There’s nothing much wrong with this. Needs a new sill, new floor, new roof, some uprights; there’s no great problem with that’. One of the trustees said he was expecting to be asked for a gallon of diesel and a match. When it was unveiled, one or two of them were in tears, before they never thought it’d be completed,” Sara remembers.
It was followed by slightly earlier four
The gentlemen who showed us around it were a bit nervous – they said, ‘Can it be done?’ We said, ‘There’s nothing much wrong with this’
compartment third No. 61. Both of the carriages were substantial restorations, but they pale into insignificance compared to what was required on NSR brake third No. 23.
“That definitely was a rebuild!” says Sara. “That was dug out of the hillside by a Roman archaeologist and written up in best archaeological practice. We did find some interesting artefacts. One of the threshold plates under the double doors is original. We found an original lock that was refurbished – it was working within a week.”
Industrial re-creations
Another industrial line has also become a fairly regular customer, which led to the biggest carriage tackled by Stanegate so far. Former North Eastern Railway bogie carriage No. 2853 is now running at the Tanfield Railway, in an industrial guise as NCB A15. The carriage body is 49ft long and only just fitted into the workshop at Haltwhistle. Despite its size, the privately owned carriage also has another place in Stanegate history.
“That was probably the quickest decision we got to start a vehicle,” Sara says. “It was about a fortnight between giving a rough estimate and getting the go-ahead. We started in 2015 and finished it in 2017.”
Another Tanfield project has just left. Ex-Great Northern Railway No. 1441 was restored in the 1990s with a semi-open layout following life as a camping coach. The changed operations of the coronavirus pandemic meant more compartment carriages were needed, so Stanegate completed the return to a fivecompartment layout with all of the extra doors, partitions and seats needed.
Also planned for operation at Tanfield is another privately owned carriage currently in the final stages of restoration at Stanegate, NER family saloon No. 70. The 1870-built four-wheeler has been preserved for 45 years but probably hasn’t carried a passenger for more than a century. Even by Stanegate standards, this is a meticulous restoration, every detail being recreated, including some particularly eye-pleasing varnished panelling. It is hoped that work will be finished later this year.
At the opposite end of the scale is what Sara describes as the oddest job of all, a ‘carriage’ from the Peterhead Prison Railway, a governmentbuilt line north of Aberdeen dating from the 1860s.
“It was quite an interesting thing; it was made out of pitch pine and was built a bit like a boat. We don’t know who built it originally; there’s no information and very little photographic or written evidence,” says Sara.
The project also involved the team at Stanegate handling fundraising and interpretation for what became quite a long-term project. That team currently numbers six; a workshop manager, two joiners and three ‘lads’ as Sara describes them.
Vehicles that most would stare at in disbelief as a ‘lost cause’ are just another day at the office for this lot. “Building wooden coach bodies is a specialist skill and rebuilding them is an even more specialist skill,” Sara points out. “You’ve really got to understand what needs to be rigid and what needs to give slightly.”
“We did decide that we’d stay with the wooden stuff because it’s a harder skill and its very satisfying to work with wood. We do metalwork, but we’re not metal bashers. A number of firms do specialise in things like Mk 1s, but 49ft is the biggest we could get in safely without stopping us using the workshop properly.”
Learning the value
But while that’s the hard-headed business reason why Stanegate has never diversified into volume carriages like BR Mk 1s, there’s far more heartfelt logic, one that questions so many decisions made on rolling stock up and down the country.
“I do get very frustrated that more people don’t consider their wooden carriages. There’s so much out there, and once it’s gone it’s gone forever. Yes, you can make a replica, but it ain’t the original. We always try to retain as much original material as possible; you can do all sorts with modern glues. It retains the spirit when you have the original material.
“Smaller, timber carriages fulfil a different niche in the travelling market, they’re more for people who appreciate the heritage and history. The older carriages embody more of the social history of the railways – that’s why they’re interesting. They allow people to appreciate how lucky they are in terms of modern facilities. It’s important we don’t forget.
“I think what goes on the drawbar is equally as important as what is going ‘chuff’ at the front. You can’t just have 95 locomotives – they need to pull something. The more unusual things you can hook on the drawbar, the more visitors are going to look; if you’ve got a mixed train or a different set of carriages they’re going to ask questions, then you’ve got them engaged.”
You can certainly say they create unusual things to hook onto the drawbar. Whether it’s a ‘Knotty’ Brake Third or a Welsh Highland saloon, nobody could ever accuse their vehicles of being dull, and they’re certainly as deserving of your attention as what is on the front.
With the cost of maintaining BR-era carriages going up and up, and with so many more unusual vehicles still in existence, is that decaying hulk in the siding really a lost cause yet? It’s a fair bet that Sara and the team won’t think so.