Abbey Hill Steam Rally (4th - 6th May, 2019)
This is one of a series of pages I have uploaded to illustrate facets of the steam rallies we have attended in the UK. Click here for the 2019 introduction and overall index.
Our other visit to Abbey Hill (Yeovil) was in 2014 when 21 conventional steam road engines were on show. This time there were rather more, 35 (just 6 of which had been here in 2014), swelled by a gathering of the Sentinel Drivers Club. 3 of these engines were later arrivals on the Saturday as they had been out on a 35 mile road run (see below). There was a very satisfying mixture and apart from two engines which vanished off to the far side of the ring, all were parked facing west as expected which made for a leisurely start to photography. Unfortunately, the show ground site severely limits movement and with a fair journey home we would have had a long wait for the 'grand parade at 17.15 which I guess would have been too late for most of the 'normal' punters too. So apologies for repetitive compositions made worse by my desperately needing to replace my main camera which, like its operator, has frequent 'senior moments' which may not be apparent at the time.
For me it's a sobering thought that so far 2019's far flung rallies have produced just 8 new engines, if the weather had been better on the other two days, we might have gone to the new rally at Higham Ferrers which would have produced 3 (out of 8 present). Enjoyable as they are, my virtual bank manager has impressed on me that our intensive rally programme is economically unsustainable and I think we shall have to be more selective in the future. Fortunately, there's not much temptation before the end of May
Choose the page you are interested in and within that, click on a thumbnail for a larger image. Then click again to return to the page.
David Collidge's Steam Scenes website (http://www.steamscenes.org.uk/) is a fount of information and was a great help in compiling these pages.