5643 to SVR

Oops! Moral: Check what you read first! I quote from page 14 of the current SVR News: "Southern 34045 SKP is having some attention paid to some minor faults"....etc.

Perhaps the writer of the loco notes comes from Ottery St. Mary !!

46118

 

They were both at Barry!

 

In all fairness, I would imagine a good number of loco owning groups would consider 12 months to constitute a "short period"! 28' was out of traffic for 17 years give or take a few months (i was 3 when it came out of traffic) to give but one example.
With regard to the steam pipe, the possibility of manufacturing new is one that we continue to look into. There has been some success in sourcing the required grade material, the other obvious issue being finding someone that is able to turn it into the, as you said, rather difficult shape of a GW steam pipe. It stands to reason that other GW loco owning groups will have this problem in the future, and so liaison in ordering a batch of new pipes should make sense both financially and practically. So far the great GW standardisation plan has worked in our favour in that there have been suitable spares available on out of traffic locos, the owners of which have generally been benevolent enough to share/loan to other locos to keep them in traffic. It would probably be unwise to rely on this always being the case.