While the island’s steam railway has been forced to source different coal, the department that runs them says there is no evidence this has led to the increase in trackside fires.

Throughout the very dry summer, there have been 26 fires within the vicinity of the railway this year.

The island’s steam railway, like other heritage lines in the British Isles, used to operate on Welsh steam coal from the Ffos-Y-Fran mine and continued to do so until early this year.

However, with planning permission due to expire, a failure of its washing plant led to an earlier than planned closure of the mine.

While the mine could yet reopen following the repair of the broken machinery, the situation forced Isle of Man Transport to source coal from elsewhere.

A spokesperson said: ‘The department has been experimenting with coal from many sources including Russia (prior to the Ukraine invasion), Colombia and Poland.

carbon-neutral

‘The department has also trialled manufactured coal products some of which include carbon-neutral content such as coconut husks and olive stones.

‘The department seeks to source the best-value steam coal with the lowest emissions.’

While each type of coal will have different chemical makeups, the spokesperson said ‘this is not likely to cause any significant change in the incidence of trackside fires’.

They added that there is ‘no correlation between the type of coal used and the occurrence of fires’ and that environmental factors were the biggest contributory factor.

Throughout this year, the Department of Infrastructure recorded 26 fires in the vicinity of the island’s steam railway.

However, it isn’t clear if this included the recent embankment fire which had spread into an adjacent stubble field, on a farm in Orrisdale.

While the year has been exceptionally dry, the DoI said it has put measures in place to ‘mitigate the risk of fires’.

These include an enhanced programme of vegetation management, limiting the size of trains to lower the load on engines, fitting spark arrestors to all locomotives and emptying ash pans more frequently to reduce the volume of ash.

The department added: ‘The fire train is a dedicated engineering loco and crew which are put on standby in the event of heightened fire risk.

‘The fire train is manned by members of the permanent way team and is on standby while services are running.

‘Fire locations are tracked and the fire train placed at the point of highest risk/least travel to speed up response.’

While the steam railway is unable to use other types of locomotive, Groudle Glen Railway took to using diesel engines after a fire, unrelated to the railway, on the glen’s headland.

In the UK, some heritage railways have also stopped using steam engines in order to prevent trackside fires.