IT might sound like ‘taking coals to Newcastle’, but a railway tour company has chartered a steam train to take passengers from London to meet up with the West Somerset Railway (WSR), the longest heritage railway in the country.

The first Railway Touring Company (RTC) excursion is tomorrow (Saturday, July 22) and the experience will be repeated twice more, on August 12 - a day after the 55th anniversary of the last steam train run by the then-British Rail - and again on September 16.

RTC will use Jubilee class steam locomotive No 45596 Bahamas, which celebrates its 90th anniversary next year.

After leaving Paddington at 7 am, Bahamas will pick up passengers from Slough, Reading, and Newbury before making the journey via Taunton to Norton Fitzwarren.

It will then transfer to the West Somerset line and travel to Bishops Lydeard, where the carriages will be coupled to a WSR steam train to haul them through to Minehead, arriving at about 1.25 pm.

An RTC spokesman said: “This provides a truly fascinating day out travelling through beautiful scenery to the Bristol Channel coast.”

Visitors tomorrow will have about one-and-a-half hours in Minehead before the WSR engine takes them back to Bishops Lydeard, where they connect again to the Bahamas and return to London Paddington shortly before 10 pm.

Times vary slightly for the August and September excursions, giving visitors more than two hours in Minehead.

The Bahamas was built in Glasgow in 1934 by the North British Locomotive Company for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) and was named two years later after the islands in the Atlantic Ocean, which were part of the British Empire.

When the railways were nationalised in 1948, it became owned by British Rail and was transferred to Liverpool, and was bought for preservation by the Bahamas Locomotive Society (BLS) in 1967.

It was taken out of service in 1973 for an overhaul and for its livery to be returned to British Rail green, and then in 1990 BLS moved home to Keighley, in West Yorkshire.

A major overhaul began in 2013 and Bahamas again hauled its first rail tour for 25 years in 2019.