Heritage railway takes action to prevent wildfires

2 hours ago

Elliot BallWest Midlands

News image — The Severn Valley Railway has fitted its locomotives with sprinklers and spark reduction devices

BBC Lesley Carr wearing a bright orange high-vis jacket and white hard hat with the damaged bridge in the background largely covered in a white sheet. — The Severn Valley Railway has fitted its locomotives with sprinklers and spark reduction devices

The Severn Valley Railway (SVR) has spent "many thousands of pounds" to mitigate the risk of causing wildfires along its network.

It comes after Network Rail introduced a one-week nationwide ban on steam trains after a West Coast Railway train, known as the Harry Potter train, was believed to have sparked a wildfire in Cheshire.

The combination of high temperatures and dry conditions was believed to have caused the steam locomotive to emit sparks, which then caused a fire.

Lesley Carr from SVR, which operates between Bridgnorth in Shropshire and Kidderminster in Worcestershire, said the tourist attraction took "all the precautions" it could to prevent a similar incident.

A green steam train runs through the countryside while the driver in a white shirt, dark-coloured apron and cap, leans out of his window. — Locomotives on the Severn Valley Railway use sprinklers to reduce the risk of wildfires along its network

"It's hard to give a definite figure on how much we've spent but I think you can safely say it has gone into many thousands of pounds when you consider we have a fleet of steam engines, and we have to make these adjustments to them all," she said.

"It's a significant investment but we feel it's extremely worthwhile as it enables us to operate those locomotives more than we would be able to do.

"Safety, and safe operations is our priority and that's something we're very committed to investing in."

The head of communications said sprinkler systems and devices designed to reduce sparks were some of the measures taken.

The ban does not affect SVR or other heritage railways but Carr said the Kidderminster attraction had its own system to decide if it was safe to run its steam locomotives.

"Currently, we're running under what we call a red risk," she said. "That is towards the high end but it's not the very top, that's red-red.

"If we decided it was red-red then we would be unable to operate steam locomotives on our heritage line, and we would have to replace them with diesel locomotives."

Carr said a red-red risk was determined by factors including temperature and rainfall. She said an example had been in June when the Met Office issued a red weather alert.

"That immediately put us into a red-red status," she said. "It wasn't so much the lineside fires that were going to be an issue but just the sheer danger of operating trains in such extreme weather conditions.

"We didn't want to put our staff or passengers at risk."

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