“There’s something wonderfully steampunk about a bunch of people taking machinery from another age and keeping it alive"

Luxembourg’s industrial past gets a distinctly more eccentric makeover this weekend as the Steampunk Convention returns to Fond-de-Gras, bringing Victorian-inspired costumes, Jules Verne-style invention, street entertainment, concerts and creators to the Minett Park.

Speaking to RTL Today Radio, volunteer Olivier Broy said the elaborate costumes are a major part of the atmosphere, with some visitors spending months developing characters and accessories. And with authentic steam locomotives rumbling through the valley, there are few better backdrops for a gathering involving quite so many goggles, waistcoats and improbable pieces of brass machinery.

Those trains are more than scenery. Broy volunteers with Train 1900, which operates the historic railway between Pétange and Fond-de-Gras throughout the summer season, alongside the mining railway that takes visitors underground into the area's industrial history. Keeping the machinery alive is decidedly hands-on work: running a steam locomotive for a single Sunday can mean manually loading around one and a half tonnes of coal. The authenticity of the site has also attracted film productions over the years — including one memorable shoot that transformed Fond-de-Gras into a Russian winter, complete with artificial snow, despite temperatures outside topping 30°C.

The convention runs Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm, with Train 1900 operating throughout the weekend and visitors able to travel from Pétange aboard the historic trains. Broy also stressed that the railway is always looking for volunteers, with maintenance work taking place on Saturdays and jobs available for pretty much every level of expertise, even if your engineering experience begins and ends with holding a paintbrush. And, as was pointed out during the interview, that tonne and a half of coal isn't going to move itself.