IT'S been quite a spring!

As well as cancelling our Day Out With Thomas event, we also postponed the award of our Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service and our planned tidy-up.

We are hoping that all the bad weather is now behind us so we can look forward to some warmer sunnier days.

Didcot Railway Centre is now open daily until the beginning of October and we have been pleasantly surprised with the number of visitors who have come on these quiet days.

We have welcomed another visitor this year as Captain Baxter has joined us for a months from the Bluebell Railway.

He is a rather splendid brick red-coloured engine with a tall chimney.

Captain Baxter was built in 1877 by Fletcher Jennings and spent his working life at the Dorking Greystone Limeworks in Surrey.

The limeworks were next to Betchworth Station near Guildford and the site is now managed as a nature reserve by the Surrey Wildlife Trust.

The railway siding at Betchworth was used to take away the lime and to bring in coal.

Like many other industrial sites, the limeworks also used horses. An article describing the works mentions some of them: Bob was bought for £60 in 1920; Pedlar came in a part-exchange deal in 1898 and Duke worked for eleven years, much longer than the average working life of eight years.

Captain Baxter has been at the Bluebell Railway since 1960 and was overhauled before returning to traffic in 1982. His latest overhaul was in time to join in the Bluebell Railway’s 50th anniversary celebrations last year. He is a bit small for the Bluebell Railway with its long trains but he can easily pull a couple of carriages on our demonstration lines, so he's perfect for us.

Captain Baxter will be with us for a few months while we complete the overhaul and restoration work on some of our own steam engines. It is a lot of work to keep these historic machines in running order and as soon as we get one thing fixed, something else seems to go wrong. Our large tank engine, GWR No 4144, is in the Locomotive Works having some work done and we are hoping to have her ready for the main season. Our lovely diesel railcar, No 22, is also having some work done but again we are hopeful she will be ready soon.

We are looking forward to Easter when we will be open and running trains for the Easter weekend. We don’t have a 50th birthday to celebrate this year but we will have our usual range of family activities including an Easter treasure trail and a colouring competition.