Her Majesty The Queen is to visit the Isle of Wight Steam Railway on Wednesday 19th May, and formally open the Railway's new Heritage Lottery funded Carriage and Wagon Workshop at Havenstreet Station.

The Royal Visit and the formal opening of the Carriage and Wagon Workshop, will be a major honour for this award-winning organisation. During the visit Her Majesty will experience at first hand the fruits of hundreds of thousands of hours of preservation work to retain and operate a small piece of the Island's once extensive network of steam operated railways.

A view of the Carriage and Wagon Workshop.

The Queen will arrive by road at Wootton Station where she will board a train for the short journey to Havenstreet, accompanied by a number of Island schoolchildren. The Royal Train will be headed by 1876-built London, Brighton and South Coast Railway A1x Class 'Terrier' No.W8 'Freshwater' and The Queen will ride in one of the Steam Railway's historic four-wheeler carriages - No. 6369, which was originally built in 1887 for the London Chatham and Dover Railway, before being used on the Isle of Wight from 1924 as part of a push-pull set on the Ventnor West branch. Upon withdrawal in 1938, its body was used as a summer house at Newtown, near Yarmouth and sported a thatched roof! The carriage was rescued and painstakingly restored to running order by the volunteer craftsman at the Isle of Wight Steam Railway in the 1990s.

On arrival at Havenstreet, Her Majesty will then pass through the station itself which, with its original signal box, waiting room and platform, recreates the past glories of this former Southern Railway rural halt. After meeting staff and volunteers who maintain the vintage locomotives and carriages, The Queen will tour the Railway's new Carriage and Wagon Workshop and unveil a plaque to mark its opening.

1876-built W8 'Freshwater' will haul the Royal Train.

The opening of the Carriage and Wagon workshop by The Queen, marks the conclusion of Phase 1 of the IW Steam Railway's imaginative Carriage and Wagon Restoration Project, and signals the beginning of Phase 2. The £700,000 project, which has been part funded by a grant of £483,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), will see nine more historic vehicles returned to use over the next ten years. The Railway raised partnership funding over five years to achieve the remainder of the costs.

The project has been led by Commander Brian Bell M.B.E. RN (Retd) who will escort the Queen on her tour around the new facility.

The visit will be a significant milestone in the Railway's 33 years of Island railway preservation. The Queen will be following in the footsteps of her uncle, the late Lord Mountbatten, who visited the Railway in the 1970's, and her husband HRH The Duke of Edinburgh who visited the Railway in August 2001. On both their visits Lord Mountbatten and Prince Philip took the controls of steam locomotive No. 24 'Calbourne' for a trip up the line to Wootton station and back!

Commenting on the visit, the Railway's Chairman John Suggett said, "The Queens visit to formally open our new Workshop is a great honour for our Railway and will be a tremendous boost to all those who put so much into keeping this part of the Island's heritage alive".

A view of the workshop interior with LCDR Composite 6378 undergoing restoration work.