Van 58 is one of those vehicles which is really only known to the staff and volunteers on the railway as it spends most of its time lurking out of sight in the yards at Minffordd or Glan y Pwll.
Yet again I'm showing my age when I say that I still refer to it by its original running number 999, which was another of those convoluted FR puns. The first bit of the is obvious enough when you consider that it started out on the railway as a Breakdown Van. The extra dimension to the joke is that it replaced one of the vintage FR covered fans, number 99, in the role.
The wagon itself was rebuilt at Boston Lodge from a 1955 Hudson vehicle purchased from R.N.A.D. Ernesettle.
After a few years it was transferred to the Civil Engineering Dept for use as a mess van and it is now used as a mobile workshop and stores van by the P Way crew.
I scratchbuilt the body from styrene about 16 years ago and it is mounted on Hudson bogies produced by Parkside Dundas.
The model doesn't do a lot of mileage on our layouts. Most of the time it is parked in the down platform headshunt / escape chute on Dduallt, and as van doesn't have vacuum brakes it's not likely to appear on Bron Hebog any time soon.
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