Interactive Weekend 2002
Interactive Weekend 2002
The bank holiday weekend is over and the team who put FR Interactive together are probably still recovering after their extremely successful event. The weather was glorious and the sight of so many different combinations of locomotives and rolling stock trundling around was a delight to enthusiast and ordinary travellers alike.
There was also the welcome return of Mountaineer to the FR after the locomotives' secondment to the WHR(C). The main ingredient of the event was the chance to have a go and those guests that did were able to access parts of the railway that many would never see or experience as an ordinary paying passenger. Of course if anyone wants to volunteer during the rest of the year then a whole new world opens up anyway!
An important part of the event each morning was the 25 wagon gravity trains running from Dduallt to Minffordd. These recreations of the earliest trains of the FR are unique in that they can only be seen running on the Ffestiniog. This weekends gravity trains were also designed deliberately as a teaser for the Vintage Weekend in October, when we will be running a gravity train of twice the length from the current summit of the railway near Tanygrisiau. This will be the longest such train since preservation began almost fifty year ago, although trains of even greater lengths ran on the original FR.
A big thank you and congratulations to Paul Lewin and his team for putting on FR Interactive; we have no time to rest however as we roll onto Blaenau 20 - the celebration of 20 years of returning to Blaenau Ffestiniog on the weekend of 1st-4th June and the arrival of the Queens Jubilee Baton Relay in Blaenau on 15th June.
