How we built a tram in a textile mill

When we moved into Spindle Yard and Nadia said “let’s rebuild the tram in here”, I assumed she meant a picture of a tram. She did not. She meant a full-size, walk-in, ding-the-bell 1960s tram, on the first floor of an old textile mill, with no lift.

Step one: don’t buy a real tram

Real trams are heavy, expensive and mostly owned by museums who are not keen on escape rooms. So we built one. The frame is timber, the panels are steamed plywood and the seats came from a church hall clearance in Bolton. The brass bell is genuine. It cost more than the seats.

The whole thing went up the stairs in pieces:

• Eighteen wall sections, numbered in chalk

• Forty-two seat slats, which we sanded twice

• One route map, printed four times because I kept spelling Ancoats wrong

• A ticket machine that took three weekends and most of my patience

Making it feel like it moves

A tram that doesn’t move is a corridor with seats. The trick is sound and light. Dev wired a low rumble into the floor and lamps that flicker past the windows on a loop, so after a minute your brain fills in the rest. Players regularly grab the handrails. We have not told them.

“Somebody once asked if it was going to stop at Piccadilly. We said yes. It did not.”

Tom, who builds the sets

The puzzles came last, which is unusual for us. Normally Nadia writes the story and I build around it. This time the tram existed for three weeks before it had a single lock, and we spent evenings just sitting in it, eating chips and asking what a conductor would hide. The answer, it turns out, is everything: ticket stubs, timetables, a flask, a grudge.

That’s why the room feels lived in. Every object has a reason to be there, even the ones that don’t open anything.

What we’d do differently

Measure the stairwell first. Twice. And maybe build the second tram somewhere with a lift.