Preservation Era
The works reopened on 20 September 1954, since when many of the original buildings have been extensively repaired and their usage altered. Machinery has been updated and modern materials and techniques have been introduced. Additional workshops have been built as well as new locomotive servicing facilities and carriage storage depots. The works undertakes the restoration and preservation of the railway’s historic locomotives, carriages, wagons and features of all descriptions. It also builds new steam locomotives and passenger carriages, and undertakes the ongoing maintenance of the Ffestiniog Railway's expanding fleet of railway vehicles.
In 1977, Boston lodge works undertook the design and installation of oil-firing equipment on the British Railways locomotive "Owain Glyndwr" on the Vale of Rheidol Railway. This was probably the first of numerous outside contracts that the works has undertaken over the years. These outside contracts have included restoration work on steam engines and the complete construction of various replica narrow-gauge passenger coaches.
In December 1998, a £375,000 Heritage Lottery Fund Grant was awarded to the FR Trust and this provided, amongst other things, for the construction of an extension to the carriage workshop at Boston Lodge to form a ‘Heritage Centre’ that would be a permanent home for the restoration of historic vehicles in a secure environment. Restoration to a very high standard has included most of the surviving Ffestiniog Railway Victorian era passenger coaches and a carefully selected rake of about 50 slate wagons representing most of the variant types characteristic of the local slate operations.
From 1993 onwards Boston Lodge works has undertaken extensive locomotive restoration work for the Ffestiniog Railway owned Welsh Highland Railway (Caernarfon). Recently the works is undertaking the construction of new passenger carriages for service between Caernarfon and Porthmadog.
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Famous quotes containing the words preservation and/or era:
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)