September 2026
Long Lost Footage of the Manx Electric Railway's 100th Birthday!.
Andrew filmed the Manx Electric Railway's centenary celebrations on Hi8 in 1993. Decades later, we transferred his unplayable tape to DVD, and he shared the recovered footage with the railway for its archives.
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In September 1993, our customer Andrew took a Sony Hi8 camcorder to the Isle of Man to film the centenary of the Manx Electric Railway. The first trams had run on 7 September 1893, almost exactly a hundred years earlier.
He filmed about an hour and a half of the celebrations, including the final grand procession of tramcars at Laxey.
Then the technology moved on. The camcorder went, his Hi8 player stopped working, and the tape became unplayable, until he sent it to us to be transferred to DVD.
There is a certain irony in that. The Manx Electric Railway is the oldest electric tram line in the world still running its original rolling stock: two of the three cars that opened the line in 1893 are carrying passengers to this day. Those trams are still going after 133 years. The format Andrew filmed them on didn't last 33.
Andrew has since sent a copy of the transfer to the Manx Electric Railway's own staff, for their archives.