New Year, new project
New Year, new project? With the 80 class project now its final stages, our carriage team volunteers has turned its attention to the next major restoration project. This is CIÉ ‘laminate’ carriage 1918. It is one of the of the very first carriages to arrive at our railway back in the late 1980s. 1918 hasn’t […]
First Aid Check-Up
Running a heritage railway goes beyond maintaining locomotives, carriages and infrastructure; we need to look after our people too. Having a fully-stocked First Aid kit on site is essential to this. Yesterday, our volunteer Tony called in to conduct their regular inspection. This is to ensure that our First Aid supplies are kept stocked, up […]
New Year’s clean up
With Christmas out of the way, many people feel it’s a good time to have a shed clear out. A time to start the new year afresh. Well, we don’t do anything on a small scale like that. In order to tidy up our locomotive shed, volunteers were needed en masse. The Maghera Shed is […]
Railway Robin
We’re always on the lookout for new volunteers. Well, today our track gang were joined by their newest foreman on the railway, Robin. Though diminutive in size, Robin arrived with his own high-vis orange PPE and an impressive CV, including extensive experience in locating mealworms and peanuts. As you can see, he was closely and […]
Christmas break Permanent Way work
With the Santa trains over, the winter closure period is a useful time for our track volunteers to get on with some maintenance and upgrade jobs. These tasks just can’t be done when we are running public trains. A relatively small project to kick off the winter programme of work was the replacement of a […]
DCDR shortlisted in three categories in HRA 2026 Awards
We’ve some more positive awards news to finish off 2025. The Heritage Railway Association has shortlisted us in not one, not two, but THREE categories in their 2026 awards. Our railway we are particularly proud of being very much people-focussed. The locomotives and carriages are important, but the real success of DCDR is the people […]
The lights of winter: a different view of the Lapland Express
Lev Pavliuk took his drone to the skies over Downpatrick on the last weekend of our Lapland Express Santa trains to experiment with night time drone photography, and we think you will agree that the results were pretty special. The relatively slow speed of the train made for some dramatic nocturnal views of our diesel […]
Santa picks Grand Draw 2025 winners
SANTA PICKS GRAND DRAW 2025 WINNERS The prize winners for our Grand Draw were finally chosen on Saturday 13th December 2025 onboard a packed Lapland Express train. Santa Claus selected the lucky prize winners, watched carefully by Mrs Claus and two of their elves to ensure everything was properly handled! The winning ticket holders were: […]
SERC students lend a helping hand
Christmas is the busiest time of year at our railway. As a result, our Lapland Express Santa trains need a larger team of volunteers to run than other services. So when SERC Downpatrick offered to send us a few of their students to help out over the Christmas period we were only too glad to […]
Lapland Express 2025 season comes to an end
Phew! After four weekends of hard work and five months of preparation, our Lapland Express 2025 season is finally over. Four weekends saw 39 Santa trains operate, carrying thousands of passengers who met Santa, Mrs Claus and the elves. This involved a support crew of dozens of our hard-working volunteers. Passengers came from across the […]