A chap on another list has posted this.

He's obviously focused on the train side of things, but has made me realise that there were ambulance trains at TT. Any help out there? All input gratefully received.......................

This evening I have been mostly reading a signalbox register from St. Johns (3 miles from Peel) - apart from the historical railway interest as the register dates from 1963/64 there is a bit of bike content.

On 18th June 1963 there is a series of entries referring to the running of an 'Ambulance Train', presumably an engine, long bogie guards van with bed/Doctor/Nurse in attendance.

(I appreciate that this is a series of *very long* shots.) Firstly - what race was going on at that date? Secondly - is there any reference in more bike related books out there to the running of an Ambulance train on the Isle of Man for the races? I've not got any material in the vast corpus of stuff in the library on Manx railways. It looks to have been based at Kirk Michael on the line to Ramsey. Thirdly - Does anyone have any idea what was the incident? The entries are: 1.15 left Ballacurry, picked up Doctor at Ballacraine, arrived 1.21 at Ballacurry; 2.15 left Ballacurry for Douglas.

There is also an entry in each of 10th and 12th June 1964 with the Ambulance train running, but no record of an incident - apart from it took an hour (as opposed to 10 minutes) to get to Crosby on the 10th. I guess they were loading. :-(

I guess these trains only ran if there was an injured biker needing to get to Douglas Hospital - they didn't run around empty IYSWIM.

Any thoughts?