Ever wanted to be a steam locomotive driver? There's an opportunity this Bank Holiday in Skegness

Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway is inviting people to take part in their ‘The Big Help Out’ – an initiative organised by the Royal Voluntary Service to celebrate the Coronation of HM King Charles III.

The event at the railway at Segness Water Leisure Park takes place this Bank Holiday Monday, May 8, to encourage more volunteers.

Chairman of the Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway Historic Vehicles Trust, Richard Shepherd, said: “We’re delighted to welcome people who want to volunteer on the LCLR and we’ll have a train and volunteers waiting at our Walls Lane station in the Skegness Water Leisure Park to show them how this unique railway operates and how they can be part of it.”

Would-be volunteers will be welcomed from 11am to 3pm. Richard added: “The Royal Volunteer Service have included us in their Big Help Out app, so anyone looking to be a volunteer in Lincolnshire will see what we’re doing and be encouraged to come along, to see how we operate and, we hope, to be inspired to join us.

“You don’t have to be a railway enthusiast (many of our volunteers say they are not) – the satisfaction is being part of a good-natured group conserving and operating for the pleasure of our visitors, a significant part of our heritage, which would otherwise have vanished –

and putting a smile on our passengers’ faces.

"It is sociable, physically and mentally healthy good exercise and as we all know, there is no shortage around Skegness of fresh bracing

air in which to work”.

The Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway was the very first heritage line in the whole world to be built by enthusiasts on a greenfield site (as distinct from reopening an existing line). Its first trains linked a local bus terminus with the nearby beach and holiday camp at

Humberston, near Cleethorpes in 1960 and after closure in 1985, moved to the Skegness Water Leisure Park in 1992.

After years of restoration by the volunteers, the line reopened in 2009.

The railway is owned by a private limited company, but all the operations, maintenance and restorations are carried out by volunteers from a registered charity, the Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway Historic Vehicles Trust. (Charity registered in England # 514443).

Many of the vehicles (and some rails) go back to the British Army’s trench railways of World War One; the “Simplex” diesel locos are based on a design developed for use in that conflict and the steam locomotive Jurassic is even older – dating from 1903.

There have

been several awards for the LCLR’s volunteers’ achievements, most recently the Morgan Award for Rolling Stock Restoration for the renovation of the unique “Queen Mary” carriage in the Heritage Railway Association’s “Railway Oscars” 2023.

HRH The Princess Royal visited the railway in 2017 to see the volunteers’ achievements, enabling them to operate a Royal Train to convey her.

For more on the railway, visit www.lclr.co.uk or the Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway Facebook page,