Fawley Hill Vintage Transport Festival (25th -
28th August,
2023)
This is one of a series of pages which I have uploaded to
illustrate facets of steam rallies we have attended in the UK.
Such events occur all over the country in the summer months, they are easily
found by using your favourite search engine and may have anything between a
handful of steam engines and hundreds (as at the Great Dorset Steam Fair
which could probably be fairly described as having an excess of riches). Click here for
the overall index for 2023.
One of the best steam rallies I have attended was the
Fawley Hill Rally in 2014 designed to celebrate the 70th birthday of Judy,
the wife of the now late Bill McAlpine. This event was styled as a 'Vintage
Transport Festival' for the National Transport Trust in aid of Macmillan
Cancer Support and priced accordingly. Originally scheduled for May, it was
postponed owing to 'poor ground conditions' and while the late August Bank
Holiday with GDSF cancelled might have seemed a good idea at the time, the
steam element attendance at least was well below what might have been
expected. Indeed almost half the engines had attended the Stoke Row rally
nearby in June so when Paul Gilbey attended on the Friday, he encountered a
somewhat muted atmosphere. Of the engines present, the most significant one
was the newly 'original' Kemna gun tractor which I had seen at Banbury in
2018 as rebuilt as a steam roller.