The UK’s last remaining cinema carriage is set for its first screening in 37 years, following a loving restoration.
Saved from extinction by passionate volunteers and associates of its former manager, the mobile cinema is ready to roll. It will screen on September 13 and 14 as part of a special Railway 200 celebration.
Opened by Princess Margaret in 1975, it was part of a travelling exhibition marking 150 years of modern railway.
This coincides with Railway 200’s current exhibition train, Inspiration, on its year-long, 60-stop UK tour.
The cinema coach went on to screen British Rail staff training films until 1988, before being consigned to use as a meeting room in a Bristol depot in 1991.
In his final years, its former manager Alan Willmott feared it would be scrapped, and its history lost forever.
But in 2019, volunteers had it moved to Swindon & Cricklade Railway. With the help of Mr Willmott’s family friend, Steve Foxon, they embarked on a six-year project to preserve its legacy.
“Alan was the closest person I had to a grandfather,” said Mr Foxon, a curator at the British Film Institute.
“When he died, he left all the cinema coach’s paperwork to me.
“Much of the restoration work was done by volunteers at the Swindon & Cricklade Railway, and it’s just stunning. It looks like it did in the 1980s.
“Sitting in the carriage absolutely warms my heart and takes me back to my childhood. It’s exactly what Alan would have wanted and there isn’t a better way to honour his memory. My dad was a close friend of Alan’s and he’s absolutely over the moon.”
Mr Foxon and his father, Rob, helped fund the project using money left to them by Mr Willmott, following his death in 2014.
The restoration involved repanelling, rewiring, repainting, raking the floor, adding a speaker system and installing vintage seats salvaged from a cinema in Deptford, London.
Martin Rouse, who led the volunteer renovators, said: “The coach could’ve been returned to passenger use, but so much history would’ve been lost.
“What we have now is almost unique, nowhere else offers this facility, and it’s great to see what it’s become.”
The coach will screen British Transport films on a rebuilt 1970s Bell and Howell projector at Swindon & Cricklade Railway on September 13 and 14.
Entry is free but attendees must buy entry tickets to the railway.
The coach, which seats 25 people, will be static, although in future films may be screened on the move.
One film due to be shown is Locomotion, a 15-minute history of rail travel made for the 150th anniversary.
The film is named after Locomotion No 1, which, on September 27 1825, made the world’s first steam-powered, passenger railway journey at the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway.
Over the past two centuries, the railways have enabled mass tourism, sports leagues, internal migration, the standardisation of time, the introduction of fish and chips to our staple diet – and much more.
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