VANDALISM at Downpatrick Railway over a year ago has had a knock on effect.
Thieves stole buffers and coupling gear from a wagon at the Market Street railway in May 2012 and 12 months later railway officials have been forced to scrap the wagon.
The wagon could not be used because of the vandalism and the cost of repairing it was so prohibitive the railway had no alternative but to cut the wagon up for scrap.
The wagon was a former passenger carriage, built for the Northern Counties Railway which operated the Larne and Derry/Londonderry railway lines, before the body was scrapped decades ago.
After that the metal underframe was used to transport track materials all over the Northern Ireland railway network before it was moved to the Downpatrick and County Down Railway.
A spokesman for the DCDR said: “We hate to see anything cut up, but the costs of fabricating new draw gear and buffers was simply too expensive to justify. Thieves don’t appreciate that you can’t simply go to the buffer store and get new ones.
“We took the decision to recover as many reusable items from the wagon which will go towards the restoration of another passenger carriage currently under restoration and cut our losses with the rest of the wagon,” he said.