Faversham Festival of Transport 18/19 May - Community Rail Week 2024
Community Rail Week for 2024 has a theme of “More Than A Railway”, encouraging Community Rail Partnerships across the UK to share their work to wider audiences and set out how Community Rail can help people and places to flourish.
An invitation to return to the Faversham Festival of Transport offered an opportunity to bring Kent Community Rail Partnership to a new audience.
The Faversham Festival of Transport saw the usual Saturday market supplemented by vintage bus rides around the town and out into the surrounding countryside, an added attraction to bring in more visitors. On Sunday the town centre hosted a vintage and classic car show.
Our volunteers were there for both days, in the prime location of the historic Guildhall alongside Railfuture and the City of Canterbury Model Railway Society.
It was a very busy weekend with over five hundred people through the doors. Bags, pens, stickers, colouring in pages and puzzle sheets flew off the shelves; spreading our branding around the town.
There were lots of conversations about taking “Days Out By Rail Adventures” on a “Go Green By Train” journey with cycle maps of Sheppey and our new tourism brochure for the island’s attractions proving popular.
We introduced many people to Railcards, families were informed of the “Kids for a Quid” scheme, “GroupSave” and other offers that can make “Days Out By Rail” more affordable. Linda made sure that everybody who came along got to know about Southeastern’s Hop on Board podcasts and how to “Go Green By Train”.
A huge number of people came through the doors over the weekend, giving lots of opportunities to talk about our project work and the impact it has on our communities. We shared stories from our Annual Report of our award winning work and the volunteers behind it.
The knowledge of our volunteers, the team from Railfuture and a little help from google enabled us to answer many queries relating to train travel today and future plans for the railway in Kent, with considerable interest shown in the potential for restoring passenger services on the Hundred of Hoo line.
An enormous thank you to all our volunteers for making it such a fabulous event, it would not have been possible without their commitment and support.
We were proud to be share how Community Rail is about “More Than A Railway” as we celebrated “Community Rail Week”.
