Ramsey Bay, like much of the Isle of Man's east coast, has a wide tidal range and a shallow approach. At low water spring tides only about 16 feet remained at the pier head, just enough to accept ships of around 250 feet in length. The pier was conceived as a landing stage so that Isle of Man Steam Packet ships could pick up and discharge passengers without waiting for high water. In the era before fast catamarans and roll-on roll-off ferries, that mattered enormously. A pier of this length, walked end to end in a stiff northerly with luggage in hand, was no joke. Sir John designed a working solution rather than a promenade. The promenade element, when it came, was an unintended pleasure of the structure.

The builders ran a tramway along the deck purely to move materials to the seaward end during construction. The tramway was supposed to be dismantled when the pier was finished. Instead, Sir John added passing loops and sidings so that passengers' luggage could be wheeled out without anyone carrying it. The catch was that the luggage wagons still had to be pushed by hand. By the 1900s a passenger car had been added so that travellers did not have to walk the 2,160 feet themselves, especially unpopular when the wind blew and the rain came in horizontally. The passenger car also had to be pushed by hand, and it was usually quicker to walk. The 1930s finally brought a Ford 20 horsepower locomotive that managed just under 10 mph. In the 1950s a Wickham railcar with a 52 horsepower Ford engine could go faster, but its inadequate brakes meant the throttle was never fully opened.

The last steamer called at the pier head in 1970. The structure carried on as a curiosity, an ornament of Ramsey's seafront, until safety concerns forced it shut in June 1990. The Hibberd Planet petrol locomotive that had once trundled passengers along the deck was taken away to the Jurby Transport Museum and preserved. The luggage cart, long disused, was simply left in place. For a generation, the gates stayed locked and the ironwork rusted in the salt air. Anyone who has watched a beloved structure age into disrepair will know the particular dull ache of walking past it year after year. People in Ramsey did exactly that. The pier was both an obvious heritage asset and a maintenance liability nobody wanted to fund.

In 2015 the Ramsey Queen's Pier Restoration Trust began negotiating with the government. By March 2016, they expected the keys within two weeks. In May the gates of the 130-year-old pier were unlocked for the first time in 25 years. In July 2017 a five-year lease let work begin in earnest. The plan: restore the first three bays of 55 (later 60), then the next batch, then the next. Four years and 20 volunteers later, the first three sections reopened in July 2021. The Hibberd locomotive and bogie carriage came home from the Jurby Transport Museum on loan for the celebration. In October 2021, a £50,000 Dormant Assets lottery grant kicked the next phase off. In August 2024, the pier tramway carried passengers for the first time in 40 years. By the summer of 2025, the public could walk the first eight bays on Sunday afternoons, and the tram ran with them. The work continues, bay by bay, by people who simply refuse to let the structure go.