Meet the Volunteers

STEAM - Museum of the Great Western Railway is hosting Meet the Volunteers on Saturday 21 November, a family day run by the museum's own volunteers. The sessions are led by the people who keep the place going, including former railway staff, and the main draw is the footplate access: you can climb up into the cabs of four locomotives. There's Caerphilly Castle (No. 4073), built right here in Swindon in 1923; King George V (No. 6000), from 1927; City of Truro (No. 3717), built in 1903 and famous for allegedly hitting 102.4 mph on Wellington Bank in 1904; and No. 2818, which is on loan from the National Railway Museum.

If you're not familiar with the venue, it's worth a bit of context. STEAM sits in a restored Grade II listed engineering workshop inside the former Swindon Works, the GWR locomotive works that ran from 1843 to 1986. At its peak, the Works covered over 300 acres and turned out roughly three locomotives a week, making it one of the largest railway works in the world. The museum itself opened in 2000, replacing the smaller GWR Museum that had been running since June 1962. The building dates from around 1842 and was built using squared rubble from Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Box Tunnel, on the historic Churchward site in the Rodbourne area of Swindon.

The collection is anchored by pre-nationalisation GWR locomotives, and the four on the footplate list are among them. Caerphilly Castle and King George V are both Swindon-built, and City of Truro is one of the oldest in the room. The sessions include a guided tour as well, so you'll get the stories behind the engines rather than just looking at them from the floor. It's a family day, so it works as well for kids as it does for anyone who just likes trains.

It's included with admission and free for STEAM Season Ticket holders, and there's no need to book in advance. If you can't make the 21st, there are also sessions on 7 November.