All Aboard at Didcot Railway Centre

Back last month we took Andrew's dad out for a mystery tour to celebrate his 74th birthday.
We told him a couple of months in advance to keep the date free and amazingly he didn't twig where he was going until he was only a few miles away.

The surprise destination was...Didcot Railway Centre!

It's somewhere he'd been meaning to visit for about 40 years and just never got round to it; me and Andrew spotted that Tesco were doing 5x the value on their Clubcard Days Out deals and one of them was Didcot so we thought that would be an excellent trip out for him (and for us).

Me and Andrew have been to quite a few different railway attractions and I reckon Didcot has to be one of the best. The trains don't operate every day but if you pick a 'steam day' or event, I think you'd certainly get your money's worth. We went on a weekend called 'All in a Day's Work' and once we'd paid our entry fee, we could have as many trips on the trains as we liked - and we made sure to have several.

Another bonus point was that you could actually look round everything and walk over the tracks. It doesn't sound like much but so many places have gone so health and safety mad nowadays that you can't look at anything closely. That's not to say Didcot wasn't safe, it clearly was and had a lovely air of family-friendliness to it; the precautions taken were just right, meaning that you could enjoy the day and not get peeved that everything was cordoned off (which pleased the old people very much!).

As well as the rides on the trains (with engines being swapped over during the day so you got to ride on several different ones), there was also locomotive restoration sheds, museums, an air raid shelter (complete with the sound effect of bombs dropping around you), station recreations, woodland walks and carriage displays.

There were plenty of times you forgot you were in the centre of a large modern bustling town with the mainline railway station just next door!

If you're interested in railways, I'd definitely recommend sticking Didcot on your list of places to visit. We all had a fabulous day and father in law seemed dead chuffed to have finally made it there!