GW King at L & M Centenary 1930

I understand that one of the visiting locos at the Centenary Celebrations of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was a then new GW King - 6029(?).

At that time the GW had running powers into Manchester from Chester through Warrington, though Kings were not allowed North of Wolverhampton.

Bearing in mind the gauging issues of GW locos generally - and Kings in particular - when operating out of their territory, I would appreciate if anyone could shed some light on:-

a) where was it shedded (Patricroft?)

b) by which route did it travel from GW to 'foreign' parts.

Many thanks

 

Eric Mason in 'My Life with Locomotives' confirms 6029 and places all the visitors at Agecroft. Unfortunately he gives no details of the route taken there or back, but since a Castle had already worked the WCML to prove that Fowler's pacific was unnecessarily large, presumably along the L&M to Parkside and then downVulcan Bank and so down to Stafford?

 

Thanks for the information LMS2968. Your suggested route appears entirely logical.

 

This question has always intrigued me too. Certainly the loco was only 1 month old when it was in Liverpool. There are 2 photographs of it in Laurence Waters' book "The power of the Kings" (still available I think). On page 7 there is a view of it on the turntable at Agecroft in "September 1930" (no firm date). There is no visual evidence of it being in steam, although the fact that a driver is visible in the cab and the reversing rod is in back gear seems to indicate that it probably was. The second photo on page 8 shows the loco on display at Wavertree with the smokebox door open and the inside of the smokebox painted white! When this was done is anybody's guess but it does say that either the loco was hauled dead from Swindon to the exhibition, or that the GW sent a gang of men to Liverpool to clean the smokebox out and whitewash it. It does appear from the photo at Agecroft that the loco was steamed and worked back to the GW. Looking at the options, the Kings were banned on the GW north of Wolverhampton at that time, although if hauled dead it would have been somewhat lighter without water and coal and may have been permitted to be dragged dead as an out of gauge load from Wolves to Crewe via either Salop or maybe even the direct line through Market Drayton. On the other hand it could of course have been transferred to the LMS at Wolverhampton and worked through to Crewe via Stafford and on to Liverpool. I suppose that if anyone has access to old RCTS files there may be something that tells us which way it went, but I asked a number of people years ago and no-one ever came up with an answer. so there's a challenge for someone.

Bob