BUCK PLANS HAPPY ENDING TO TOUGH YEAR
Steam Dreams has set a date to restart: November.
“We’ve cancelled our summer programme, which was August and September, and we don’t have anything in October anyway”, chairman David Buck explained on August 11.
The decision means that the Surreybased promoter begins with its busy pre-Christmas season, which this year is to see the debut of a series of ‘Santa’ trains from London’s Victoria (SR508). It also follows research among passengers, which David says showed that people on Steam Dreams’ general trips wanted to hang on for the “full service” – and without encumbrances such as face coverings.
However, says David, the ‘Santas’ are family-orientated trains, “and of course children under 11 don’t have to wear coverings, and they’re only 1½ hours, so parents will probably live with it.”
This does not though mean that Steam Dreams is only planning to run its new product: it marks a general restart and since the promoter will “have our catering up and running… we’ll certainly run our trips to the Christmas markets.”
“My hope was that the restrictions would have been lifted by then. I’m not so sure now, but we’re certainly planning to run.
“Then we start again in March and have a very busy programme.”
The first of the pre-Christmas days out in the diary is London to York from Ealing Broadway, via the Midland Main Line (steam one way). That’s on November 22.
Amongst what follows, Steam Dreams also has two trains booked to Bath (from Paddington on November 29 and Victoria on December 1), where the Christmas market has now been cancelled although some attractions are intended to remain. However rather than pulling them as Saphos has done with its trip, the plan is to extend those days out to Bristol so there’s a choice of where to get off.
● David Buck says he’s not sure whether he’d have run his proposed summer trips with Flying Scotsman, had the engine been available (“I don’t know”, he told me in August). The ‘A3’ is now undergoing work – see story above.