The Festival of Steam 2017, which has events running all this week and over the weekend, is a celebration of all the island’s vintage transport systems.

One of the events was a guided tour of the stables where the tram horses, known affectionately as ’trammers’, live.

In their heyday in the mid-1930s the horse trams carried two and three quarter million people in a season. More than 80 horses would be carrying out between eight and 10 return trips every day and the wear and tear on the roads meant that their metal shoes needed replacing every 10 days by the farriers who worked in the smithy on site.

The smithy still stands and the farrier work is still carried out by stable staff but much else has changed.

Now there are just 21 horses either in service or in training and their working day is just two return trips.

All the horses, Shires and Clydesdales, are bred in the island. They begin their training when they are four years old, working with the trammers’ stable staff in the fields at the Clypse where they spend the winter, learning the basics pulling light loads.

’As they become more confident they come to the stables and start working on the beach where they can get used to the sights and sounds of Douglas,’ explained our tour guide, Stuart Mullan.

The biggest horse currently in service is Steve who, at 18.2 hands high, would dwarf any Grand National winner.

The smallest is Mark at just over 14hh. Mark is also the oldest, at 24. Normally the horses are assessed for retirement at 20 but Mark has remained fit and well enough to carry on, albeit with reduced working hours.

The horses’ diet is tailored to giving them the energy they need for their work.

For the past 20 years Bushy’s Brewery has been donating its spent barley to the stables and this is mixed with locally grown oats for their feeds.

The horses get through around one tonne of barley each week. They also produce a tonne of manure which goes to the allotments in Willaston.

Two of the younger horses not yet in service had been brought down to the stables to meet the visitors: Blae, a yearling Shire mare, and Nelson, a three-year-old Shire horse.

It is by no means certain that either of them will ever go into full service.

The debate as to whether the horse trams still have a place is nothing new. It’s been going on since the 1890s, when it was proposed to replace them with an extended electric tramway running right along the promenade, and it is still going on today.

Stuart Mullan said: ’Last year was the first year the horse trams were run by Isle of Man Transport and an extended season saw them carry 69,542 passengers.

’Their future is guaranteed for the 2018 season but after that nobody knows!'