On a cold December weekend, a steam locomotive built in Yugoslavia in 1960 made its first official run on the North Dorset Railway at Shillingstone, hauling a Santa special past crowds who had waited a decade to see it move under its own steam. The engine, No. 30075, crossed Lamb House Bridge for the first time, marking the end of a ten-year restoration by the volunteer group Project 62, per BBC News in December 2025.
The story matters less for the machine than for the ledger of hours behind it. Heritage railways across Britain run on retired engineers, schoolteachers and weekend volunteers, and Shillingstone's revival of a derelict Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway platform has been one of the slower, quieter examples — this publication writes about places, not travel bookings, and the details here come from documented reporting.
What locomotive is No. 30075?
The engine is a Yugoslav Class 62, a shunting design descended from the American S100 0-6-0 built in vast numbers during the Second World War. Per BBC News, the locomotive arrived in the United Kingdom in 1990 and was moved to Shillingstone in January 2016, where volunteers began the long work of returning it to operating condition.
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Why does a branch line extension matter?
The debut run coincided with the completion of the railway's line extension, giving the restored engine fresh track to work. For small heritage lines, running length is survival: every metre of track translates into tickets, memberships and grants. The North Dorset Railway, run almost entirely by volunteers, now has both an operating steam engine and a longer line to run it on.
What comes next for the railway?
Winter santa trains give way to a spring service, and Project 62's volunteers will keep maintaining an engine whose parts must often be machined by hand. For travelers planning a slow day in north Dorset, the railway's 2026 operating calendar will be published on its own site; the Christmas crowds, at least, have already voted.
The Somerset and Dorset line itself closed to regular traffic in 1966, and Shillingstone's station spent the decades afterwards as a scrapyard and a cow shed before volunteers took it on. The locomotive's debut, in other words, closed two restorations at once: an engine's and a station's.