It was all to mark the arrival of a carriage once used by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their 1954 Australian tour and Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1983.

A thrilled Seymour Rail Heritage Centre president John Crofts spoke to The Standard after disembarking from the first of three shuttles on the new Boorcan loop.

"We have 550 to 600 passengers today including walk-ups, so we're quite pleased with the turnout across the three services," he said.

"This middle one, the lunch time one, is the busiest. This one is completely sold out, as you can see. It has about 300 people onboard so it's going to be very busy.

"These carriages date from 1906, most of the carriages on the train are from 1906, the steel dining car is from The Spirit of Progress which is from 1937.

"The state car, the royal carriage, is from 1913-14."

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He said it was the third or fourth time the royal carriage had travelled to Warrnambool, but the services had expanded.

"In recent times we've brought it down to Warrnambool for a number of charters," Mr Crofts said.

"Previously we haven't been able to offer trips to locals, so we've had our charter customers and they were going back to Melbourne but there wasn't enough capacity to do shuttles like we're doing today.

"It's growing in popularity and there's big demand for these sorts of rail tourism products and that's what we're all about.

"We just need to be able to get access to the network, to the track and be able to have our train scheduled in order to be able to deliver these in-demand products to the public.

"We're very pleased, there's good weather, the turnout is great and people seem to have smiles on their faces. The greatest thing for me is seeing the little kids just awe-struck seeing the old equipment and seeing the old engines work, having a great time."

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