Burnley & Pendle Miniature Railway,

Thomson Park, Burnley, Lancashire UK.

August 2026 Newsletter.

Hello and welcome to our newsletter.  August, height of summer and some strange weather days to relate which have given us a strange time, sometimes very busy and sometimes hardly any passengers at all. Still, we carry on regardless and on the quiet days it has given some of us a chance to carry on with the odd bits of maintenance when we would normally be manning trains.

We had 2 visiting steam locomotives during the month for a weekend and we certainly enjoyed their visit. We added Fagan one of our steam locos to the roster and it was good to see 3 steam engines on the roster running at the same time, sometimes 4 trains out if our wheelchair accessible train was called on, we hope the owners enjoyed their visit.

For a long time, we have been watching the concrete apron to our turntable steadily breaking up and decided to sort it out a while ago. During the summer running it was not appropriate to make a start and so it has been awaiting the winter closure of public running at the end of September for us to commence, however much prep. work has gone into it and the flaking surface has been swept many times with all the obvious loose bits removed, then keying grooves with a large grinder cut into the surface to assist the topping to secure. At the end of summer Wednesday running when the schools went back, we hoped to lay the new surface last Wednesday, but we were rained off, we will see how that goes this next Wednesday, hopefully a fine day.

So, at the end of September, we cease public running but we do not close for the winter, still meeting up on weekends and Wednesdays to carry out essential maintenance.

We have projects planned for the winter which have been desirable for some time such as an electrical and compressed air piping connection to run down to the station for our turnout controls to replace the hydraulic operation which is proving very unreliable and a locomotive charging connection at the station to be used in between running for our electric locomotives would be extremely useful. This will require a narrow underground trench being dug.

Further to that getting our electric railcar back into operation would be most helpful as it has sat in the shed awaiting attention all summer. I am not a loco guy but as I understand it bigger motors and heavier chain drives are required. It is ideal as an instant replacement train.

I and 2 other members do the track maintenance, and we can start catching up with the never-ending job of keeping the track in good order in winter. We can only attend to work required to keep the track safe in the summer as all 3 of us need to work on train running but we do have a rolling programme of maintenance during the close season when running stops.

We are blessed with the ability to split our railway into 2 looped halves track wise with a switch of a turnout and this is useful if during the winter we need to take a track panel out for instance and someone wants to test a locomotive or whatever.

I think that catches us up for August so thanks for reading. We are always amenable to new members joining if anyone is interested, as I said we are always at the Railway weekends and Wednesdays,