The complete steam news magazine

Steaming back to the future

Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be; today it’s a multi-million pound business! Everything harks back to better days of years gone by, to a past seen through rose-tinted glasses that may have become somewhat clouded by the cataracts of time. For train enthusiasts around during the fading age of steam, and aware of its demise, it was a rather bleak scenario. Everyone in that late steam era would have remembered how pitiful those days really were, with grossly neglected and filthy locomotives eking out the last of their working days. One or two got that special attention, but the majority were just unloved machines, grubbing around on an equally decaying railway network. Enginemen did their best with what little morale was left, some still loyal to their beast, but the malaise of cynical resignation was prevalent everywhere. The huge empire of beaurocracy that was British Rail was stretched to the limits, entangled with internal conflicts of diametrically opposed interests. The clean modern image that British Rail wanted to promote with its new diesel and electric services had scant respect for the dignity of the labour intensive steam locomotive that had actually given birth to the railway age. As a token gesture, the very end of working steam was commemorated with that famed ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’, that worked out along the route of the world’s first passenger railway, and up over the Settle and Carlisle Line to return to Liverpool…then there followed a steam enthusiasts’ version of a nuclear winter!

As man’s most demonstrative of machines, it is hardly surprising that we have such affection for the contraption that Trevithick had been bluntly told would never catch on! The Iron Horse really was in reality, the beast that changed the world, as it spurred in a new age of industrialisation and communications. Harnessing the elements of fire and water it powered itself with a wealth of sound, smoke and inspired the engineering genius of the time to improve its performance. For a century and a half this machine would become the master of land transport around the world…not bad for an invention that wouldn’t catch on! Now, no longer as a prime haulier, steam power still commands equal attention in charismatic entertainment value, keeping those old work skills alive and creating a new social amalgam of personal interests. Those who worked on steam at the time had a sort of love hate relationship. If your driving roster involved a week of early turns on a local pick up goods over a forgotten branch line across the moors in wild wet and windy winter weather working tender first with a lurching cantankerous Aspinall half cab and a motley collection of unfitted wagons that preferred to go their way…then the comforts of a Sulzer type 2 would be like a dream!  If you worked on the railways as a conscript of financial circumstances, as most did, then working conditions were all important ...an Ivatt 2MT was better than an Aspinall and a Sulzer type 2 was the Hilton! Of course it’s all very different now, for if you are working on the footplate, you are there solely because you want to be there. There is that element of choice and your steed will be in far finer fettle than ever it was in working days, for locomotives were built en masse and treated like fleet cars. It’s rather ironical at one time men were paid to be on the footplate, and now you have to pay to be there!

Everyday the railway preservation movement pushes out the boundaries of excellence that bit further. Back in 1968 who could have imagined what we almost take for granted now. If I had said then, that in 40 years time I would watch a Peppercorn A1 racing north through Oakleigh Park again I would be asked what had I been taking! and maybe I should stop smoking that stuff!

But for the Barry miracle the railway preservation scene could have been very different. Apart from the National Collection there were not so many locomotives preserved. Billy Butlin had plinthed a few priceless gems from the hall of fame but nobody then thought that any of these would ever move again. With the purchase of LMS 4F 0-6-0 No 43924 there started the slow exodus from the huge railway graveyard that in turned spurned numerous heritage railway preservation projects which in turn generated a revived interest in trains…it was no longer a hobby for the elite who had the wealth to buy a working locomotive. Some projects really were regarded as mission impossible, nobody ever thought that No 71000 Duke of Gloucester would leave Barry, let alone be restored. In reality railway preservation had never before taken on such engineering challenges. As for locomotives with cut wheels, they were certain ‘goners’. Bulldog determination and British engineering excellence have proved to the world just what can be done by so called enthusiasts.

Train fans all around the world are watching us, for with the creation of Tornado, nothing really is impossible…it may be impractical, may be implausible, but impossible…no!  So now after many years the first of the main line Dodos has breathed life…and following in the slipstream is a collection of interesting projects, each with their own set of devotees. Some wacky genetic engineering is going on with some very big Barry bits. Soon those who cloned us a working GWR Saint will walk around with well-deserved halos! Also coming soon under the same branding, is that ‘goner’ of a King, soon the blue blood of regal power will be pumping and he will waiting in the wings to regain the throne. Like fiendish scientists working late in their lab every night creating a monster of surprises, those of the Great Western Society are hatching some awesome creations. GWR could also stand for Gorgeous Working Replicas, for in their lab are the formulaic plans for a County class 4-6-0 and even a 47xx 2-8-0. Around Britain there must be at least a dozen or so new locomotive projects on the ‘shop floor’ just in standard gauge alone.

The A1 Tornado has really completed the line up of express passenger super-power that was the mainstay of the steam era. Not since 1962 have all of the classes been at work somewhere in Britain and yet at any weekend any of them can be seen somewhere in the UK…for that we must be grateful. If we compare the huge landmass of the USA, it has only some 15 ‘mainliners’ and France is much the same. However railway preservation is not just about celebrity locomotives. The fast elegant ‘namers’ always stole the limelight, and were captured on newsreel footage, but in the shadows were numerous classes of the now forgotten also-rans! How has preservation remembered them?

Considering the number of ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0s that were saved, it was sad that from the vast number of ‘Woofles’ that proliferated in Scotland and the North East, not one was preserved. 733 WD 2-8-0s made up this numerous class that vanished into extinction just before the end of steam. Only by luck was an example found in Sweden and a suitable distinctive tender chassis found at Scunthorpe steelworks to be married into the Worth Valley’s sole example of the 2-8-0 version now numbered as BR No 90733. Several 2-10-0 versions have also been repatriated to complement the preserved WD No 600 Gordon. Equally close to becoming extinct were Stanier’s 8F 2-8-0s of which the WD locomotives were a simplified version. No 48773 preserved by the Severn Valley Railway was the only locomotive apparently not destined for scrap.

A page-by-page wander through a 1958 Observer’s book of railway locomotives of Britain brings home the true extent of those classes that went without trace. In reality some 13 more classes of locomotive would have passed like the WDs into extinction, if it were not for Barry scrapyard. From the GWR the 4200, 7200 and 4300 classes were sole examples as drom the Southern were the S15, Q, U, and N classes. From LMS origins were the Stanier 5MT mogul and the pair of S & DJR 7F 2-8-0s. Lastly from the short-lived BR designs, the 76000 and 78000 moguls and the 4MT 2-6-4Ts of the 80000 series and of course the unique 8P 4-6-2 No 71000 Duke of Gloucester.

Of the some 400 locomotive classes administered during the British Railways period, some 100 exist in some form of preservation. Dividing the locomotives into categories built for defined duties, by far the best proportion preserved are the express passenger types and mixed traffic classes. The most blatant omission, is of any heavy duty shunting designs, built for hump shunting, some of which survived quite late into the steam era. Coming close to this category is the Hawksworth designed 0-6-0PT No 1501 preserved on the Severn Valley Railway, having survived as part of a trio sold to the NCB to work at Coventry colliery at Keresley.

Not one of the big tanks survived. With their unusual 0-8-4T wheel arrangement, the Great Central S1 yard bruisers were the first large purpose-built shunters and some even boasted boosters. Most of their working lives were spent in Wath yards but by the mid-1950s they were gone. Wordsell designed his handsome three-cylinder 4-8-0T versions for the NER. They were to become the LNER T1 class built specifically to provide the muscle to shove long wagonloads of King Coal into trains ready to be despatched at the docks in the North East. Equally handsome and sharing the same wheel arrangement were Urie’s 1921-built hump shunters designed to work at the new Feltham marshalling yards.

The last two of these survived tuntil 1962 outliving their NER brethren by just a year. Slightly smaller locomotives of the same genre were built on ex GCR Q4 chassis to help the war effort, and these 0-8-0Ts were classified as the LNER Q1 class. They were introduced in 1942 at much the same time as OVS Bullied introduced his Frankenstein lookalike, the Southern Railway Q1 0-6-0. The Southern Railway had already built its own 0-8-0Ts, the celebrated Maunsell Z class of 1929. For shunting locomotives these had colourful lives, for three were requisitioned by the War Department for use at the Military Ports 1 and 2 at Faslane and Cairnryan. Their duties in the south of England had been severely curtailed by Luftwaffe actions against coastal shipping and all the ports. However, they will best be remembered for their banking duties between Exeter St Davids and Exeter Central. At one time it was rumoured that No 30951 was to be kept aside for preservation but sadly it never happened. Yard shunters were easy prey for diesels, with 08 class shunters proving far more flexible and versatile. If ever a category of locomotive justified a replica it would be one of these. Now wouldn’t a Z tank be the perfect banker for an H2 LBSCR Atlantic pulling a full Sunday train up Freshfield Bank. How will the Bluebell Railway top its Beachy Head project…Will that remain a cliff-hanger??

In the category of large fast suburban passenger tank locomotives, the story is not so good either. These were very much the unsung heroes of their day, just getting people to work and back, nothing charismatic about that! With the introduction of DMUs or route electrification and mass line closures, they were quickly made redundant and surplus to requirements. They were machines that no-one really gave a second look, locospotters and enthusiasts on shed visits just jotted their numbers and went on to look at the bigger named locomotives, or smaller cutie types. Considering the diversity of classes during the British Railways period, only a handful of pre-BR designs have survived. This is probably the biggest hole in the British railway preservation scene, and yet they were very practical machines designed for quick turnaround and comfortable working bunker first, and hence an ideal choice for working branch-lines and today’s preserved railways, but they had gone long before most of the heritage lines had come into existence.

Barry scrapyard provided some 10 GWR large prairies for preservation, to complement No 6106 saved by the GWS, one No 5193 now having been converted into a mogul. Due to early electrification of the Southern suburban services and hence never a great user of large suburban tanks, in latter years most prolific were the BR standard 4MT 2-6-4T. The LMS story is really quite pitiful, considering the vast number of suburban tanks that worked within the London area and as far north as Glasgow, just a handful remain, the LTSR 4-4-2T No 80 Thundersley, and its successor the three-cylinder 2-6-4T No 2500, and the two Fairburn tanks now working on the Lakeside & Hatherthwaite Railway. Not one of the numerous Stanier versions survived. The only Fowler version never scrapped was No 42325 which remains buried deep beneath the hard shoulder of the southbound M1 at Scratchwood services. It was crashed in the former Scratchwood sidings in April 1962 during the filming of Dirk Bogarde’s tongue-in-cheek movie The Password is Courage. It would be cheaper to build a replica than try to extract the remains.

As for the story of the LNER, and its constituent large passenger tanks, the story is but a tragedy, absolutely nothing exists from the wealth of distinctive classes. Not one of Gresley’s V1 or V3 2-6-2Ts, nor any of the bigger but less successful Thompson  L1 2-6-4s. Similarly the brutish GCR Robinson A5 4-6-2T disappeared along with all the handsome NER  NER A8 4-6-2Ts. These latter locomotives were regulars on the former Whitby – Scarborough route and a replica would look just so fitting on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Small passenger tank locomotives were ideal for embryonic preservation groups and hence many more were preserved than their larger cousins. Apart from costing less in scrap value they were more suitable for lightly laid tracks and easier to maintain. The Southern and Western really have a wealth of examples running. Not so for the LMS, just a quartet of Ivatt 2MT 2-6-2s plus the Webb Coal Tank No 1054 and National Collection L&Y 2-4-2T No 1008.  In its early days, the Worth Valley tried to secure No 50850 but just could not raise the funds.

Probably the most distinctive type from the LMS constituents to become extinct were the Midland Railway Johnson 0-4-4Ts somehow associated with sleepy branch lines. A replica of one of these would not look out of place on the Worth Valley, Severn Valley, East Lancashire, Lakeside, Nene Valley, Embsay , or Midland Railway, just to mention a few! The NER G5 0-4-4T project is a bright sparkle of hope that at long last one of the LNER types is being remembered. Also part of the LNER heritage were a few rather interesting 4-4-2Ts such as the Robinson C13 and C14s  and North British C15s and C16s but the dainty darlings of them all were the GNR C12s often associated with the former Stamford & Essendine branch, but they also once worked in London on the Highgate and Alexandra Palace branches.

One hundred GNR J50 0-6-0Ts with distinctive sloping tanks went to the melting pot as did numerous other LNER 0-6-0 tender and tank classes. It would be curiously interesting to know what the total tonnage of all locomotives scrapped finally amounted to?  The LMS ‘Jinties’ have faired better, having always had a following, possibly inspired by the Triang model of the1950s with its distinctive key-hole aperture in the side tank. Thanks to the Kitmaster kit the diminutive L&Y Pug also won a place in people’s hearts and the Worth Valley bought its first for £450 back in 1964. Virtually every later GW pannier prototype has survived, as well as a collection of the small prairies that were associated with those forever sunny Cornish branch lines. Maybe a Dean 1900 class open cab pannier would complete that GWR stud!

In preservation, prototype choice was simply limited to what was available at the time according to finances. But with Tornado and the idea of replication, a whole new concept has begun. The choice for an A1 was shrewd… apart from filling an obvious preservation gap, it provided a powerful fast machine to capture public attention, which it has done admirably. It is doubtful if replicating a County, Clan, or Patriot would have had anywhere near the same impact. For a first build replica, it would have to rub shoulders with existing stars like A4s and Duchesses, and on a very equal footing, only a P2 2-8-2 could have possibly equaled it. Now that immense learning curve involved will be of benefit to all who follow, and who knows what will steam next, or be the next replica project. We all have our own ideas, usually based on what we were familiar with, but here a modicum of heritage value has to be considered. There have been quite serious gaps in the preservation and both the G5 and F5 will help to make up for some of the LNER numbered ‘also rans’. The LNWR is poorly represented and a Precursor 4-4-0 or Claughton 4-6-0 could fill that Edwardian gap quite comfortably. A long gone Cardean 4-6-0 would be a fitting tribute to the memories of the Caledonian Railway but for pure elegance and aesthetics, the beautifully-proportioned Great Eastern Claud Hamilton 4-4-0 in rebuilt form were so gentlemanly, so East Anglian!  Just imagine one of those, maybe No 62605, working over the level crossing at Sheringham with a through train from Cromer to Holt… it is not beyond the realms of possibility…!

We in Britain have been very lucky because so many of our favourites have already been preserved. That is solely due to those with commitment, steam locomotives don’t come for free! Any future replica project would have to warrant its existence, as an earner, by attracting crowds by its pseudo historical uniqueness. This of course could make it eminently suitable for use in period movies that the film industry thrives on; usually getting it seriously wrong! Each new build will of course attract attention, train enthusiasts are always hungry for something new, or should I say something old, and sometimes the older the better. We are living in exciting times, and the future of steam preservation is just simply about looking back!