As an antidote to the summer Olympic games, next Saturday, 10th and Sunday, 11th August, the Great Central Railway is holding its award-winning Railways at Work Gala.

The Gala takes visitors back to 1966, which was a pivotal year in both the history of British railways and one of great political, social, and cultural significance in Great Britain.

Titled “1966 – A New Era,” the Gala will explore the transformative period of British Railways as it began to reinvent its image, and follows last year’s Heritage Railways Association’s award-winning 1963 Beeching event.

This year’s gala will look at the impact of Dr Beeching’s reshaping plan and the modernisation of Britain’s railways.

A vintage train will take visitors back to the time when Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won a decisive victory in the general election, there was a trade deficit, and inflation was accompanied by a wage freeze.

In 1966, The Beatles topped the charts and England won the final of the football World Cup. Dozens of railway re-enactors will recreate the sights, sounds, and atmosphere of a busy mainline railway in 1960s Britain, whilst vintage trains and vehicles will help recreate station scenes in a year that’s truly gone down in history.

As an added incentive, throughout the summer holidays, the popular ‘Kids for a Quid’ offer allows up to three children to travel for just £1 each with each adult ticket.

Among the attractions will be re-enactments of how a busy mainline railway got the nation’s goods moving.

Uniformed porters at the stations will ensure the right goods get to the right destinations, to show how ‘special deliveries’ were made in the 1960s. There will also be a few more characters making use of the mainline railway to highlight events of the period.

Over the weekend, steam and diesel locomotives will be in action hauling freight trains and the Great Central’s regular service of heritage passenger trains. Details of the timetable and fares can be found by clicking here.

One of the victims of the Beeching cuts was the original Great Central Railway. It now operates in two sections, but work is progressing to reunite them, with one of the major projects being the rebuilding of Bridge 302A.

1966 has gone down in history for so many reasons, events like the Aberfan disaster and the national strikes by merchant seaman combined with the catastrophic changes being brought about by the effects of the Beeching Report highlighted the challenges being faced by those charged with transporting goods and services across the UK. Add in the attention drawn to poor working conditions and lack of safety practices in many workplaces, and 1966 not only acted as a pivotal point for the railways but for society as a whole.

This is one of our most exciting weekends of the year, with both steam and diesel locomotives in action with an impressive fleet of award-winning wagons that moved everything you can imagine. Also on display will be more unusual vehicles, like rail-mounted cranes, which will be set to work lifting heavy loads.

Malcolm Holmes, General Manager at Great Central Railway