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Wednesday 10 Sep 2025

Roll camera! UK’s last cinema carriage returns for Railway 200

Region & Route:

Wales & Western: Western

• Volunteers saved coach from extinction and overhauled it over six years
• Now it’s ready to show films again for first time in nearly 40 years
• Friend of man behind original cinema coach says ‘it’s what he would have wanted’
• Public welcome at Railway 200 celebration screening in September

The UK’s last remaining cinema carriage has been lovingly restored and will host its first screening in 37 years for a special Railway 200 celebration.

The mobile cinema was saved from extinction by passionate volunteers and the friends of the British Transport Films employee who managed it. Now, it is ready to roll camera again on September 13 and 14.

Opened in 1975 by Princess Margaret, the carriage was part of a travelling exhibition train celebrating 150 years of the modern railway. Railway 200’s own exhibition train, Inspiration, is currently on a year-long, 60-stop tour of Britain.

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 Alan’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,” explained Steve, 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.”

Steve and his father, Rob Foxon, helped fund the project using money left to them by Alan, 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 will be static, although in future films may be screened on the move. It seats 25 people.

One film due to be shown is ‘Locomotion’, a 15-minute history of rail travel made for the 150^th 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.