“The Manx Heritage Transport Festival is back for another year.
It's an opportunity to show off the unique range the Island boasts - from the steam train to the electric railway to the horse trams.
The six-day event started yesterday (Tuesday 22 July) and runs until Sunday.
Andy Cowie from Isle of Man Transport says they're celebrating a special anniversary this year.”
ANDY COWIE: There’s the 30th anniversary of Snaefell Mountain Railway coming up that's a bit later on in the year. The transport festival this year is still packed with exciting events and we've designed it to focus more on the transport enthusiast and we do get a very large number of keen enthusiasts coming over from the UK and further afield to sample our quite unique blend of railways in such a small place and it goes down very well indeed. It's having those different railways in such a small space and you've got the opportunity and the time to go on all sorts of different transport systems in a very small area and that makes us quite unique particularly as the horse trams are one of only two operating horse tram systems in the whole world so it does give quite a unique flavour to the Isle of Man's offering.
MANX RADIO:There really is an appeal here on the Isle of Man that does attract as you say people from all over, I mean have you spoken to many people who've come from further afield in the UK?
ANDY COWIE: Not so much this year yeah but certainly in the UK we get a wide range of people from all across the UK and Ireland as well and sometimes we get some visitors from further afield Europe as well so I'm looking forward to meeting some new people. New visitors come over this year to see our unique transport systems and there's a lot of people out enjoying the railways already taking pictures and riding on the trains and we had our launch of trailer 50 which recently refurbished on the MER which has gone down very well.
MANX RADIO: And there's all kinds I mean I was having a little look through what's on this week and there's even a little opportunity to have a bit of a drive of one of them isn't there?
ANDY COWIE: Indeed, yes, we do our taster days on both the MER and the diesel where you sign up and have a short drive to test out a tram and sit and see how it feels to actually drive one of our special trams and some of the diesel fleet are also quite unique mas well.
MANX RADIO:I mean I'm assuming that my two and a half year old probably wouldn't quite be…
ANDY COWIE: There are some restrictions to who can drive. You need to be physically fit and have an age...
MANX RADIO:Okay you might have to be the one that tells him that.
ANDY COWIE: When he grows up a bit.
MANX RADIO:So, give me a flavour of what else is on this week then what people can get involved with.
ANDY COWIE: Yeah, there's all sorts of very interesting transport themed events probably the big highlights there is the unveiling of the recently refurbished number 9 steam loco Douglas and we've got the clothesline bus tour where we take some of our visitors around to look at the old railway lines around Peel and Kirk Michael on the bus to see what was there and the old stations and the like which goes down very well. I have a number of workshop tours as well where we take people around our various workshops which get very exciting. We've got some of the original machines and equipment and see how we work on the trams and keep them running to a high standard. And on Friday evening we'll have quite a unique event. We've running all four of our Snaefell tram cars up to the top of the summit and we've picked Friday evening because the weather's supposed to be quite nice. We've got a high cloud cover.
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