HRA crowns Dartmouth Outstanding Visitor Attraction
A GROUND-BREAKING Herculean effort to pioneer Covid-19 measures to ensure the safety of its travelling public has earned the Dartmouth Steam Railway & River Boat Company the Heritage Railway Association’s Award for Outstanding Visitor Attraction 2021.
At the heart of a mainstream holiday destination, the railway, like the rest of the heritage sector, found itself during the first lockdown groping in the dark in a bid to discover or invent new means of keeping its passengers and staff safe in unprecedented and bizarre modern-day circumstances.
With all but three of the line’s staff on furlough, managing director John Jones and his head of engineering Paul Merrington spent several weeks working against the clock to break vast amounts of new ground in readiness for the resumption of summer services.
As reported in issue 269, they made more than 200 bespoke Perspex screens and fitted them inside carriages to allow socially-distanced seating. To maintain revenue with fewer seats, trains with extra coaches had to be run – and so the railway permanently lengthened the platform at its Paignton Queen’s Park terminus by 170ft.
The railway was also one of, or maybe even the first heritage line to source a fog machine to spray a sanitising solution as part of deep cleaning all carriages.
A revised running schedule resulted in more services each day and allowed for spreading out of passengers to avoid overcrowding, or disappointed customers who could not book a place due to full trains. As a result, the railway carried more passengers at times than on the equivalent days in 2019.
A mandatory
