The Guardian view on heritage railways: where the British summertime gets steamy

There are functioning steam railways in other countries: tourists in France can go for a ride in Brittany or the Cévennes; so can visitors travelling to the Dandenong Ranges in Australia. Mallorca has a narrow-gauge line that transports passengers through olive groves and pine forests in vintage wooden carriages. But no other country has a heritage railway sector anywhere near as vibrant as the UK’s, where more than 170 services traverse around 600 miles of track and call at 460 stations.
Just a few years after the first of these railways opened at Talyllyn in north Wales, in 1951, a fictional Welsh steam engine became the main character in the children’s television serial Ivor the Engine. On lines originally built for slate quarries, north Wales still has the biggest cluster of steam railways, but they exist in all four nations of the UK, typically operating seasonal timetables in tourist areas. The longest is the Welsh Highland, which runs from Caernarfon past the foot of Snowdon to Porthmadog. At Swanage in Dorset, and a handful of other locations, there have been trials linking up heritage services with the main rail network (although Swanage concluded that its scheme was not commercially viable and will not repeat it this year). These railways are living museums – with stations decked out in period style. Some staff wear costumes too.
Up to 95% of the 18.5m journeys on heritage railways each year are taken by domestic tourists. They owe their popularity to a combination of nostalgia, enjoyment of the countryside as seen from a railway carriage and enthusiasm for the old engines that are the heart of each enterprise. The Waverley paddle steamer, which operates as a charity running excursions on bodies of water, ranging from Scotland to the Isle of Wight, is run along similar lines.
Railways are expensive to run, and the first steam preservation enthusiasts recognised that they would need volunteers to make their dream of a revival come true. Today, that heritage rail workforce is estimated at 3,000, plus about 20,000 volunteers – who are engineers and managers as well as cafe staff and ticket collectors, and between them do about half the work.
This reliance on volunteers is not unique to railways. The heritage, culture and tourism sectors all increasingly depend on the efforts of supporters, including a good number of retirees. This is partly due to cuts in budgets from local authorities and other funders, which have damaged the social fabric and removed creative and leisure opportunities from far too many people. But as a sector invented and powered by enthusiasts, heritage railways are a good example of what can be achieved by a combined paid and voluntary workforce. As well as the economic contribution that the railways make to rural areas, there is evidence that volunteering can have beneficial effects on people as well.
The railways will need to respond, like the rest of society, to environmental policies. The destructive impact of greenhouse gases is an obvious challenge to a sector that trades on an image of coal-powered transport viewed as a charming throwback. Electric locomotives are being used for maintenance, to bring emissions down, and some railways are active in wildlife conservation. There will need to be further adaptation down the line. That the railways don’t stand still has always been part of their appeal – especially on rainy days in the summer holidays.