EXTRA tickets to ride behind the Flying Scotsman when it visits Severn Valley Railway next month have gone on sale this morning.

An extra 200 tickets were released by Severn Valley Railway at 9am this morning (August 17) to ride behind the Scotsman during the Pacific Power event running between September 22 and September 26.

Also, 300 tickets to ride behind it on September 21 which is the Railway's Charitable Trust's Charity Day.

A spokesman for SVR said as of 11.50am, 50 Flying Scotsman tickets were remaining for between September 22 and September 26.

Special event tickets, to ride behind other locomotives during the events are still avaiable from the SVR website.

Lewis Maddox, SVR's events and footplate experience co-ordinator, said: "The reallocation of some tickets to ride behind Flying Scotsman has allowed us to re-open bookings today.

"Everyone who has rung and got through this morning has been able to get tickets, and we still have tickets available to book.

"If you can’t get through, please be patient and we will answer your call as soon as we can."

"We are extremely excited about the event, and the countdown to welcoming Flying Scotsman to the Severn Valley Railway has certainly started."

Earlier this year, Severn Valley Railway attracted criticism from fans as the websites crashed an hour after the highly anticipated tickets went on sale. 

The website ran out of steam and hours later, tickets were only available from the box office or visiting Kidderminster station. 

SVR took to Facebook to apologise  to those who didn’t get tickets on their Facebook page.

The statement read: “We understand that this will be a huge disappointment for the large number of people that tried to book Flying Scotsman and Tornado tickets at the beginning of this week.

“The website is set up to sell tickets for all our special events; for example we sell over 30,000 tickets for our Santa trains using the site and telephone bookings.

“The massive spike in demand for Flying Scotsman and Tornado caused the site to fail; with up to 2,000 people trying to access the website every second, compared to an average of 90 the day before.

“The website was continually re-booted, but to no avail, therefore it was taken down.

“The two other avenues for ticket purchase remained open; telephone booking and in person sales. Whilst there is only one phone number to our Kidderminster Office, this transfers through to at least five telephones which were being constantly answered through the day, whilst the front desk had another team dealing with ‘in person’ sales.

“Both telephone and front desk teams took bookings through to 7pm on Tuesday.

"Whilst I am sure that this is of little consolation, we are very sorry that we were not able to satisfy the huge demand for tickets.

“We also apologise for the failure of the website and we recognise that many people spent considerable time on their telephones and computers trying to get through.”