There will be no further Illumination Tours in Blackpool this year it has been announced. It had originally been hoped that once England came out of lockdown it would be possible to resume tours until the end of the illuminations at the start of 2021 but after Blackpool was placed in tier 3 it has been decided to cancel all remaining tours for the year.
In a statement placed on the Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours they say: “Due to the recent announcement that Blackpool will be entering Tier 3 from Wednesday 02 December, we’ve taken the difficult decision to cancel our Illuminations Tours for the remainder of 2020. All bookings will be automatically cancelled and you will be refunded, you won’t need to contact us about this. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers for joining us this year and we look forward to seeing you soon.”
In the end this has meant that Illumination Tours have actually run on more or less the traditional Illuminations dates with a pre-booking format seeing at least one tram run on each evening. The season started without any feature cars due to overrunning works with Balloon Cars being used for the majority of the season, Rebuilt Balloon 707 and Balloon 717 have been two particular favourites to see use and the Frigate joined in the fun from the end of September when its work was completed.
With the Illumination Tour season now over we wait to see what is in line next for Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours.