About the Film

In 2018 I returned as a heritage filmmaker to Bowes Railway Museum to film The Joinery Workshop, the third in a series of short films documenting the skilled, volunteer-led restoration work happening across the site. This project gave me the chance to observe the final stage in the making of a replica tub, a small wheeled cart historically used to transport coal from deep underground to the surface.

Bowes Railway Museum

Bowes Railway, in Springwell, Gateshead, is an extraordinary survivor from the industrial age. Designed in 1826 under the guidance of George Stephenson, it was part of the Hetton Colliery Railway network and used a rope-haulage system powered by stationary engines to move wagons, a pioneering method in the pre-locomotive era. Today it remains the world’s oldest working standard gauge rope-hauled railway and is protected as a scheduled ancient monument.

Inside the Joinery Workshop

As a heritage filmmaker, I have come to appreciate how Bowes Railway is more than a static display. It is a living, working archive of industrial ingenuity, and the joinery workshop, like the forge and engineering shed before it, plays a vital role in keeping that legacy alive. Historically, the joiners would have supplied the entire yard with timber parts: props for the mines, track components and rolling stock repairs. As one volunteer in the film puts it:

There was no B&Q. You didn’t buy it, you made it.

Building the Replica Tub

In The Joinery Workshop, we see the final top section of the tub being carefully crafted. Using circular saws, planers and belt sanders, the volunteers shape raw timber into fitted panels. Safety is second nature here, with guards and cut stops in place, but the atmosphere is calm and focused, a clear understanding of tools and process guiding every step from cutting, squaring and sanding to gluing and assembly.

One of the things that struck me was the precision involved. The side panels, end pieces and internal battens were measured, cut and test-fitted before final assembly. The end result, glued, screwed and sanded, was a perfectly square wooden container, soon to be fixed atop the forged axles and wheels made in the previous two films. It will eventually become a planter, but its structure is true to the original form used underground by women and children hauling coal while men worked the cutting face.

A Heritage Filmmaker’s Approach to the Bowes Railway Joinery Workshop

I filmed the process over several hours, using a small setup to stay unobtrusive. For this kind of industrial heritage filmmaking, I find it important to let the natural rhythm of the work shape the visual style. The light inside the joinery is dappled and warm, ideal for capturing grain, movement and texture, so I focused on close detail and slow tracking shots, allowing viewers to feel the process unfold rather than having it explained to them.

Completing a Trilogy at Bowes Railway

Each yard once had its own style of wagon, built for the terrain and work at hand, and as a heritage filmmaker that detail matters. What might seem like a simple cart carries deep echoes of labour, hardship and invention, and the replica tub brings those stories forward not in words but in wood, steel and sweat.

The Joinery Workshop completes a trilogy of films I have made at Bowes Railway: starting with the blacksmith forge, then the axle and wheel assembly in the engineering shed, and now this final timber structure. What links them all is not just the craftsmanship, but the sense of pride and care the volunteers bring to every task. For me, heritage filmmaking is about revealing how the past survives in practice, not just in archives or on plaques, but in calloused hands, old tools and shared knowledge. At Bowes, history is not just preserved. It is rebuilt piece by piece.