We’re happy to announce that we’re planning to re-open the railway on Sunday 26th July and then every Sunday in August. We may open on Wednesdays in August too, but that depends on the number of volunteers that we can press-gang/ask nicely, to run the services
Things will be different. We’ll have to be socially distant whilst we queue for tickets, we’ll have to queue outside of the ticket office before we’re allowed on to the train. There will be screens between the seats of our covered coaches so that we can carry two families per coach but still keep a barrier between the family units. We’ll be cleaning the train between each and every journey. We’ll be putting in a one-way system to board and exit the train. This is still a work in progress for us, and there will probably be other things that we’ll be doing too to make sure that both you and our volunteers are kept safe during these unusual times and things are likely to change as we evolve the way that we run the service.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that we’ve had to make the difficult decision to cancel all of the special events planned for the rest of the year. This includes our annual Teddie Bears’ Picnic and our galas. The latter is particularly frustrating as we had planned a special 20th Anniversary gala for the end of August with visiting locos that had helped start the railway all those years ago. Rest assured though, this is being re-planned for 2021!!