In our recent post here, we welcomed the London County Council Tram number One from Crich Tramway Village into our workshop for a complete overhaul. Essentially we are rebuilding it from the ground-up to a better than new standard.

It is now completely stripped down and ready for the paint prep. With the scale of the body, this is no small task, so we have had to purpose build a tent to allow us to shotblast the stripped chassis without filling our site with stray sand and what could be toxic paint flakes.

Because of the age of the material on the tram itself, we are having to use a very gentle shot blast media and it will all have to be done by hand. Luckily our team are all trained and experienced in this, so we aren’t expecting to find any major issues underneath the near 100 year old paint.

The shotblasting is expected to take two days, with a further two days to clean down and prep the metal work for paint. The paint that is going back onto it is a high build zinc rich primer and we are putting on three coats. It’s definitely being done to a higher than original standard. It’s a chance for us to use our new paint spray booth and one of the reasons why we built it to be so huge. So here are the images for you to see the scale of the preparation prior to shotblasting.

We will share more images of the build as we have them.