Some snapshots of the Tractor that used to run from the Plantation Gates on Wigan Lane, across the River Douglas and up through the Plantations to Haigh Hall, in the 1970s.
This was an early version of the sort of "road train" that's now familiar in tourist resorts around the world, but it was pretty much 1950s' technology. Something akin to a small tank would haul two or three equally substantial trailers along a winding route for about a mile and half through what Wiganers always knew as the Plantations.
This parkland was once the home of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres (aka Baron Wigan of Haigh Hall) until he upped and offed to his Scottish estate. It was said that he was somewhat miffed by the local electorate's refusal to return his son as their Member of Parliament - though I can find no evidence whatsoever for that story, and I note that his successor, the 29th Earl, is a supporter of the Save Wigan campaign.
Anyway, the Earl sold his English seat, Haigh Hall, to Wigan Corporation, whose Parks Department looked after the Plantations and ran the Tractor. Local government re-organisation in 1974 turned the Corporation into the Metro, and soon after the Tractor became the Leisure Train, with the orange and cream livery shown below; and the Plantations became Haigh Country Park.
These pictures were all taken around 1975. They show one of the three tractors with its full complement of three trailers (they often ran with just two) at the start of the trip, just inside the Plantation Gates on Wigan Lane. Sadly I can't find any pictures of the tractor in its earlier livery of green and cream.
The brutes pictured here were pensioned off not many years later. They were replaced for a few years by some simpler and lighter machines, though again I don't have pictures of those. Nor can I find any on t'Web - but please let me know if you've found any.
If you want to visit Haigh Hall these days, you need to walk through the Plantations, or drive there via either Red Rock, Whelley or Haigh. The nearest that a bus gets there now is Haigh Village on I never did discover the timetable for the tractor. It seemed to appear whenever it felt so minded, without much regard for day, time or weather. I think it was supposed to run every half hour or so, on Saturdays, Sundays and Wednesdays (early closing day) between Easter and October, but it pretty much pleased itself. You could waste a lot of time standing at the terminus, wondering if it was going to show up. But when it did run, it was a lot of fun!
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routes 575 or 615 (Sundays only), though it's not a much longer walk along Higher Lane from Wigan Road, which gets the same bus routes plus the 715. You can download a bus map for Wigan as well as bus timetables from the GMPTE website.
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Here's the tractor arriving at the Plantation Gates, "breasting the bank" as it were. It's a tough climb up from the bridge over the River Douglas.
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And here's the tractor in the rudimentary turning circle by the Plantation Gates. This is where you queued to get on the tractor.
The area used to be just dirt but it's been grassed over since the tractors finished running.
Note the registration number - FEK 844. The "EK" part of the code used to mean that the vehicle was registered in Wigan. There's no year code at the beginning or end of the number either, meaning that it was registered before February 1963. But why did it need to be registered anyway? It never ran on the public highway.
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A profile of the tractor at the Plantation Gates, with the houses in a street called The Hollies glimpsed behind the trees.
I vaguely remember a private school called The Hollies, aka Notre Dame Prep School, that was there in the '60s and '70s.
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The luxurious seating accommodation. Note the air brake pipes connecting the trailers. Note the complete absence of anything to stop you from falling off the carriage. Note also the running board, which is where the conductor stood to collect fares and issue tickets. I don't think the tractor ever went over to one man operation: perhaps the cost of paying two staff is why it stopped running.
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And here's the tractor setting off again down the steep carriage drive to the bridge in the Douglas Valley.
This drive was commissioned by the Earl of Crawford back in the middle of the 19th century as a way of relieving unemployment during the American Civil War (we couldn't get cotton to weave in our mills). It involved a fair bit of hacking through solid rock, but then a lot of Wigan chaps were well used to doing exactly that down the Earl's coal mines.
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This page was posted on 29 June 2010.
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All text and photographs are © 2010, Neil Worthington.