Isle of Man Railway - Operation

Operation

The Isle of Man Railway has always seen a marked seasonal pattern to its traffic. Services evolved around two main considerations; firstly the need to connect with ferries to and from the UK and Ireland; and secondly to transport day trippers out of the major termini. The railway never evolved appreciable commuter traffic, so local traffic tended to revolve around shopping, attending the markets held on the island, and occasional trips to "Town."

From the 1870s until the early-1950s, the basic service on all three main routes consisted of four or five trains a day. The first departures from Ramsey, Peel and Port Erin were timed to arrive just before 8am to connect with the morning ferries to the UK. These trains returned to their respective termini around 8.30am. The principal morning departures left Douglas, Peel, Port Erin, and Ramsey a little before or after 10am. All three routes would see a lunchtime round trip, then another late afternoon departure from the various termini around 4pm. There were also early evening trains on all three main routes, but these disappeared quite quickly after World War II. From 1886 to 1940, the Foxdale branch was served by up to four round trips on weekdays from St John's.

Additional trains were added to the basic service beginning at Easter. Further trains were added at Whitsun and again in July to cope with holiday traffic. At its height in the 1920s, the railway was carrying well over a million passengers a year. The high season timetable consisted of up to fifteen round trips on the Peel and Port Erin lines, and up to a dozen on the Ramsey line. In 1927, at the height of "The Bus War," the IMR boasted that it ran "100 trains a day at pre-war prices."

In the 1930s, following the integration of train and bus services, it was usual for the summer train service to peak at about a dozen trains each way on all three main routes. This intensive service ran on an entirely single track system controlled by Staff and Ticket safeworking, and limited semaphore signalling. As it was exempt from the 1889 Railways Act, it also lacked signal interlockings except at Douglas and St John's. Continuous vacuum brakes were not fitted until 1926/7. In spite of this the railway has seen very few serious accidents. (see below)

Traffic declined sharply in the late-1950s. A million passengers were carried for the last time in 1957, and an increasing number of locomotives were stored, rather than reboilered and returned to service. Although the railway was still intensively used in summer, by the mid-1950s winter train services had been reduced to morning and afternoon round trips to Port Erin and Peel, and a solitary working to Ramsey. These trains operated mainly for parcels traffic. Winter trains usually consisted of a locomotive and one or two carriages. The St. John's - Ramsey service became seasonal in 1960. From 1961 onwards of the ex-County Donegal railcars handled most of the winter service.

The last two summer timetables (see http://www.iomsrsa.com) before the railways reorientation towards tourism were issued in 1964 and 1965. These show six round trips on the Port Erin line; five on the Peel line, and just two to Ramsey. With the exception of the high season Port Erin-Douglas boat train, all of these trains operated between 9.30am and 5.30pm - quite a contrast to the fifteen hours a day operation of the 1920s and 30s.

In June 1967 Ailsa issued an ambitious summer timetable that pushed a reduced locomotive fleet to its limit (See Hendry and Hendry "Isle of Man Railway Album" - David and Charles 1977). But this time only five Beyer Peacock steam locomotives and the railcars were available for service. By September services had been reduced to four round trips to Castletown, three to Peel and two to Ramsey. This pattern carried over to the 1968 season, except that the Ramsey service had been reduced to one train, thrice weekly by the end of the season.

Since the closure of the Peel and Ramsey lines, the basic service has generally been four trains a day between Douglas and Port Erin and return departing at roughly 2 hour intervals between 10.15am and 4.15pm. Most seasons an extra train has operated from Douglas around 10.45pm, returning from Port Erin about 3.30pm during July and August. A brief 1990s experiment with a six trains each way a day service in high season was abandoned on grounds of cost.

In the period 1945-1965 most trains consisted of a three carriage sets hauled by a single locomotive. Each three car set consisted of a third class, a first/third composite, and a third brake, with seats for 120 third class; and 12 first class passengers. Additional carriages - usually older stock such as "the Pairs" and "small Fs" - were added when loadings increased in mid-summer. The official maximum loading for a single locomotive was seven carriages until 1977 when it was reduced to six (SRN Spring 1978). However, during locomotive shortages, a single Medium Boiler locomotive would sometimes handle eight or nine carriages on Port Erin trains, but would be banked as far as Keristal by the Douglas Station pilot. Peel and Ramsey trains were usually combined between Douglas and St. John's. These trains were often double-headed, usually to balance locomotive workings, rather than on account of the loading.

Apart from the Ramsey Cattle Mart specials, purely freight trains rarely operated on the Isle of Man Railway. Most freight traffic was conveyed by attaching freight wagons to the rear of passenger trains. The consequent shunting often delayed passenger trains at intermediate stations, but was cost effective for the railway. A miscommunication while detaching a van from a Douglas bound train at Union Mills was a contibutory factor to the August 22, 1925 accident at Douglas Station. Freight traffic ceased in the early 1960s, though Sir Philip Wombwell did try to bring oil and container traffic to the railway 1967/8 (Hendry and Hendry, op. cit.)