The fire services say that even a relatively short period of hot weather can create conditions that make fires more likely to start and spread.
This is because as temperatures rise, moisture evaporates from grass, shrubs and other vegetation, making plants dry enough to ignite more easily and allow fires to spread more quickly. Our country branch line has neighbouring farms with fields of valuable crops that need to be safeguarded.
We are mindful of this when we run our steam engine because there is a risk of hot cinders falling from the ashpan or being thrown from the chimney.
We are using fire to power the locomotive after all!
The Railway tries to mitigate the risk by having a year-round gang removing vegetation on our land, and we have water containers alongside the track to put out any small fires that do occur. But there are still the adjacent fields.
The Railway also has a duty of care to the steam crew given that the footplate can be extremely hot.
So inevitably there will be occasions when we have to decide if it is too risky to run our trains with steam power. We try to run as advertised but sometimes we have to take the decision, at short notice, to substitute a diesel locomotive for steam.
Although we will make every effort to provide the services shown and ensure that steam traction is available, we cannot guarantee this and we reserve the right to substitute with a diesel locomotive if weather conditions force us to do so.
July 2026