West Somerset Railway - Diesel Gala - June 2017
June 9th,10th,11th 2017 Diesel Gala event marked a milestone for the WSR with the first full blown Diesel Gala event in years, the first time steam was stopped in favor of taking the brave step of letting another era of British Rail history take centre stage. Adding local breweries as part of The Ale Trail (located at Bishops Lydeard, Stogumber and Minehead) was also another great step forward in developing something unique for the future of Diesel Gala events on the line. Later running on the Saturday was also welcomed. The three visiting locomotives, two BR Green Class 20's (D8188 & D8059) and a BR Blue Class 26 (26043) were ideally suited to the line, and provided some great sounds for passengers to enjoy. The home fleet of locomotives from the Diesel Electric Preservation Group also performed faultlessly. Because of the amount of photographs which are inevitably taken at such events, and then shared on most social media platforms we tried to do something a little different to record this new look gala event. The below video (hosted on our TauntonTrains Youtube Channel) was recorded over two days of the 2017 event and provides an alternative view of the gala weekend which hasn't been tried before for this type of event.