| Since Thomas wasn't available this year due to various problems, the ELR instead held a 'family event' called the "Family Engines Big Day Out", and this featured a new cast of characters, which included, 'Jimmy the Jinty', 'Sammy the Saddletank', 'Hank, Basil & Edgar' and various other new names.
The event was held on the Spring Bank Holiday weekend, covering the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of May, and after two fine and sunny days, I managed to time my visit to the final day, when in true ELR and East Lancashire style, it was grey, wet and miserable for much of the day. After having spent most of 2007 taking pictures in these sorts of conditions I was well used to it though and didn't let that put me off, sometimes the lousy weather can make things look a lot more atmospheric, and of course there are less visitors to get in your shot, and no bright Sun to make the shooting of locos coming up from the south very difficult during the afternoons! 
In this collection you can see a number of shots taken at various locations along the line, and with just the thumper operating between Bury and Heywood, I concentrated mainly on the sections between Bury and Rawtenstall. Jimmy and Sammy kept the youngsters entertained by hauling them between Bury Station and Buckley Wells in those brightly coloured wagons, and 5197 (Hank the Yank), provided the steam services up to Rawtenstall, along with Edgar (50015), and Basil (47402) the diesel traction. As well as these there was also the DMU (Barry), which gave visitors a ride from the spare bay at Rawtenstall out to the Rawtenstall West Signal Box and back again. It was interesting to speculate on the choice of some of these names, I presume Basil got his name because he was built by Brush Traction, or maybe it's because he's always going faulty, and Edgar because class 50s are known as 'Hoovers', and what else would you call a Yank engine other than Hank? The one that concerned me most though was DMU Barry (maybe he got that name after the famous loco scrapyard), which whilst looking very impressive in its new paint job, and looking very different to when I saw it with its mottled livery at the DMU Weekend in January, had a male face at the front, and a female or very effeminate looking face on the back - is there something about Barry that we ought to know about!
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