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Cravens Heritage Trains - GoFundMe
There's a good chance you have travelled on a rapid, mass-transport system at least once in your life. For many of us it is a regular occurence as we make our daily commute. Here in London we have the London Underground, known worldwide as 'The Tube'. An unbelievable 3 million or more trips are made on the Tube every day!
Trains have run under London's streets since 1863, making it the oldest Underground Railway in the world! But have you ever wondered what happens to the old trains when they are replaced by the newer ones that run today? Sadly, most of them end up as scrap with only old photos to remind us of that part of our history, but a few do manage to escape the crusher and survive into preservation.
We at Cravens Heritage Trains were lucky enough to save a London Underground train from this fate. It is a rather special train as there were only ever 12 of them built. They were manufactured in 1960 by a British Company - the Cravens Railway Carriage and Wagon Co, who themselves have long since ceased to exist. They were converted into experimental trains for the first main testing of Automatic Train Operation. Those tests led to the world's first automated underground railway - London's Victoria Line. A pretty special train we hope you agree.
It is the survival and restoration of this 65 year old former London Underground train for which we launch our GoFundMe appeal. Cravens Heritage Trains who own the train is only a small group of people, and the costs of restoring a 3-car tube train far exceed the limited funds we have available.
The aim of the restoration is to return the train to full running order and obtain certification which would allow it once again to run Heritage Train Rail Tours on the London Underground network. The last time it ran a Tour was back in 2000 when it commemorated 100 years of tube trains on the Central LIne. There is a lot of work and money needed to reverse the 25 years of decline since then.
Whether you love or hate the commute to work, whether you still ride the tube, or whether you have little interest in railways themselves, to see this historical train restored to its former glory would perhaps remind us of the London we used to know; a piece of shared history in the ever evolving city that could be lost forever.
Thank you for reading this and an even bigger thank you if you can help to fund this very special piece of history!
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© 2025 Peter Scouse, Cravens Heritage Trains Ltd.
