All aboard the Dales rail carriage fit for a fat Queen

But beneath the layers of decades of decay lay a history of unparalleled opulence. And this weekend, the railway carriage that once conveyed Queen Victoria will reappear in the Yorkshire Dales, with one of her menus and a measure of her favourite Scotch whisky thrown in with the ticket.

The Golden Jubilee Saloon was around 120 years old when rail restorer Steve Middleton, from Harrogate, picked it up at auction for £3,500.

He had heard that bits of it were being sold off – but mindful of its pedigree as one of only two surviving Royal carriages from Victoria’s era – the other is in the National Railway Museum at York – he stepped in to preserve it in one piece.

“But it was just a shell. It had a huge 20ft hole in one side,” he said.

It spent the next decade in a shed at Bolton Abbey, but Mr Middleton worked for much of last year rebuilding it and bringing it back to its original, 1885 specification, for a TV programme on Channel 4.

Now, he is using it to recreate a Victorian age of fine dining on the move with a season of £75-a-head trips whose menu includes Champagne, caviar and quails eggs.

“I love Victorian carriages,” Mr Middleton said. “People on trains are treated like cattle today, and it gives me huge pleasure to see how they come alive when they walk into a fantastic coach like this.”

The carriage, distinguished by its gold-plated steps and a clerestory roof with windows above eye level, had given up its secrets quite easily.

“It might have looked like a hen hut, but once you started peeling back the layers you could see traces of the original. One of the features was that the doors for the servants were narrower than those for the Queen,” Mr Middleton said.

Now looking as if Chippendale himself had furnished it, with velour-lined walls buttoned in 900 places, matching sofas, a Wilton-style carpet and oak tables and panelling, it will make its debut on the Yorkshire Dales Railway, between Bolton Abbey and Embsay, on Sunday.

Trainspotters will get an early peek today, when it is coupled to the restored steam locomotive, Illingworth, for a nameplate ceremony. The engine is named after the architect William Illingworth, a former Lord Mayor of Bradford and the designer of its former Odeon cinema.

The Golden Jubilee Coach, on which Victoria hosted European heads of state including her grandson, the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, was designed to shuttle the Queen between Windsor and the south coast – from where she would have sailed to the Isle of Wight on the Royal yacht – and would not have been used as a dining car.

But Mr Middleton, who devoted himself to railway carriages when he retired from the timber trade, said he wanted to give today’s leisure travellers the full 19th century experience.

“Victoria enjoyed her whisky, her smoked haddock and her fancy breads,” he said. “She got heavier and fatter with the years.

“She also ate extremely quickly and if those with her didn’t keep up, their food was taken away.”

The Queen’s other favourite dishes included wild boar and ham mousse, game consommé with pheasant dumplings, and orange-flavour cake soaked in cream and then fried.

Despite this, one of her chefs, Charles Francatelli , went on to write a recipe collection called A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes.

The Golden Jubilee Saloon was decommissioned in 1930, by which time the Royal decorations had been stripped out. After it left service, a side wall was hacked out and it used as an entrance porch for a house.

In its original state, it had a private WC for the Queen, with a simple hole in the wooden floor for the waste.

Its rebuilding, by enthusiast Steve Middleton and his Beijing-born wife, Quiying, was filmed for the Channel 4 series Great Rail Restorations with Peter Snow.

The carriage will now run three times a day between Bolton Abbey and Embsay this Sunday and on August 19, September 2 and September 30, with a maximum of 16 passengers on each trip.