Hollycombe Steam Festival (6th - 7th June, 2026)
Portable Engine Paradise
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 2026 introduction and overall index.
The concept of an event to showcase surviving portable engines is relatively new..Apart from this one, there are other reports on this website:
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Hollycombe 2023 (Paul Gilbey report)
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Hollycombe 2025 (Chris Allen report)
You can find significant gatherings of portables in my Great Dorset Steam Fair reports, these links will take you to the relevant sections.
Of course, there are pictures of portable engines in small quantities spread across this website.
You can take two views of Hollycombe, it epitomises the 21st century steam experience. On the one hand, it celebrates a real world that has disappeared in my lifetime. On the other it is clearly struggling to keep its head above water and is almost entirely reliant on the charity of a few far sighted enthusiasts who, at great personal expense, have preserved steam road engines which they bring to its events. In the last 10 years or so, there has been some progress with the opening of what I would call a 'visitor centre' and a store where certain elements of the fairground can be stored 'out of season'. At the same time, many of the attractions which I recorded during my first Hollycombe visit in 2014 have reached the stage where they require major overhauls and the truth is that today's fairground is a sad shadow of what it was 10 years ago. The 2026 'Steam Festival' was a great event which again stretched the current operational model to near breaking point with a long queue to enter in the late morning. Like other events which have 'overloaded' it might help if they adopted the 'Park and Pay' model, currently they use 'Pay and Park'. However, the current clumsy multiple ticket options cannot help...
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. In general, I made no effort to seek out the resident non-operational engines.
