Snowdon Mountain Railway No 1 LADAS remains

[Sweep]

I've just been reading Boyd's book on the SMR and note there's a couple of photographs of the wreck of LADAS the loco which left the track on the opening day and plunged off the side of the mountain. He says the boiler was recovered but looking at the hunk of the chassis i wonder if this was ever salvaged and if anyone knows if bits of it remain to this day. An internet search reveals not a lot. 

[sir douglas]

ive never heard of any remains and cant see any reason for them to keep it because the only useful thing would be the money from selling it for the scrap value, if there was anything other than the boiler that was salvageable it probably would have been mentioned

[Wickham Green too]

But then if the loco plunged off the side of the mountain, the expense of recovering anything which wasn't reusable would NOT have been covered by its scrap value !

[sir douglas]

it would have had to be recovered any way to get rid of it regardless of the costs and that salvaged boiler would have been kept as a spare for the others so will have been used and scrapped after wearing out so nothing left of it now

 

the wikipedia says broken up for spare parts, so im not right but at the same time there was nothing kept just in memory, parts would either be reusable or thrown away

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowdon_Mountain_Railway#List_of_motive_power

[Florence Locomotive Works]

1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:

But then if the loco plunged off the side of the mountain, the expense of recovering anything which wasn't reusable would NOT have been covered by its scrap value !

But was the area where the engine landed accessible from the bottom of the mountain?

[brack]

If you've managed to retrieve the boiler already then it'd be a safe assumption to me that you can get access to where the chassis is and that you have the equipment to get that too. Lots of useful motion parts in it.

[Edwin_m]

If you've just finished building a railway in such an inhospitable place, with no railway to bring the parts in on, then you've probably got people on your team who are expert in moving large items in difficult areas.  

[laurenceb]

They would not want it lying aroun putting off potential passengers

[Andy Kirkham]

Strictly speaking the name of the engine (as it appeared on the nameplates) was L.A.D.A.S.  - after Laura Alice Duff Assheton-Smith

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, sir douglas said:

it would have had to be recovered any way to get rid of it regardless of the costs and that salvaged boiler would have been kept as a spare for the others so will have been used and scrapped after wearing out so nothing left of it now

 

the wikipedia says broken up for spare parts, so im not right but at the same time there was nothing kept just in memory, parts would either be reusable or thrown away

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowdon_Mountain_Railway#List_of_motive_power

If you read further it says that after the accident the engine was recovered and taken to Llanberis.

[Bucoops]

Sounds like the inspiration for a Thomas the Tank Engine story

[Andy Kirkham]

33 minutes ago, Bucoops said:

Sounds like the inspiration for a Thomas the Tank Engine story

IIRC it was the inspiration for a Thomas the Tank Engine story - in the book Mountain Engines (about the Culdee Fell Railway which was based on Snowdon) the engines told a story about one of their number who in the early days had misbehaved and come to a bad end (I think it was said to have been dismantled for spare parts)

Edited June 29, 2020 by Andy Kirkham

[Nearholmer]

Bits were hung-up in the engine shed to scare other engines into behaving themselves properly (so I heard).

[Bucoops]

34 minutes ago, Andy Kirkham said:

IIRC it was the inspiration for a Thomas the Tank Engine story - in the book Mountain Engines (about the Culdee Fell Railway which was based on Snowdon) the engines told a story about one of their number who in the early days had misbehaved and come to a bad end (I think it was said to have been dismantled for spare parts)

 

It indeed was

[Wickham Green too]

12 hours ago, sir douglas said:

it would have had to be recovered any way to get rid of it regardless of the costs .........

That's a very modern, environmentally friendly way of looking at things and attitudes might have been different back then if the debris was hidden in the bottom of a ravine where only the wind and rain could get to them - apart from any bits ( the boiler ) sufficiently undamaged to be worth retaining. As subsequent posts have noted, the other remains were, indeed, recovered so access cannot have been TOO difficult.