46115 Scots Guardsman

It’s Green and it left twenty odd late .

 

I think we can be fairly certain she'll be back as she was....BR Green? They could add a yellow stripe for variety i guess!

Edit: @sgthompson beat me to it!

 

Oi - no yellow stripe please. It'll be nice to see her south of Crewe occasionally!

 

If it comes south, we will impound it and politely request that a swop is made You send BIL down, meet us somewhere near Watford and we will hand it back, oh and a tender full of best steam coal

 

You'll have to ask @Victor he's the 'keeper' of northern steam assets!

 

Just buy him a couple of best porter, say, sign here,

 

Now lad, don't be silly, it would be a very big mistake to even THINK of impounding.....................and buy your own coal we're not a charity.

The last time I saw SG Uncle Albert took it up the hill from Wakefield Westgate Station, it certainly woke all of Wakefield up.
My last trip behind it, Ron Smith doing the honours, Wakefield to KX. That was a GOOD day.
It's a good machine, when 10A have got it bedded in it'll be a cracker.

 

Not my image

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAudgYUXoAAbXe1?format=jpg&name=medium

 

What a handsome beast...always did love re-built Scots Nice paint job too!

 

Oh no! What have you done??

Dave

 

Have to say it's a handsome beast, and yes I like it in green!

 

The rebuilt Scots Back in the day when I woz but a lad doing a bit of spotting the early evening Liverpool to Newcastle came up the New Leeds Line, double headed, usually a Scot and a Black 5 (occasionally a Scot and a Jubilee) They came off in Leeds and a Gresley loco took the train to Newcastle.
Happy days.

 

When I was going to Newcastle & Gateshead every Saturday in 64/5 anything starting with a 4 or a 7 was a major rarity. If a black 5 appeared on shed at Gateshead it was the talk of the school all week. Everything we saw had a number that started with either a 6 or a 9.

One dark afternoon late in 1964 I was passing Ashington station on the way home from school when out of the darkness in a cloud of steam came a strange shape, nothing like the regular Q6s and J27s, lumps all over the top of the boiler, totally unfamiliar outline, then I caught a glimpse of the number in a street-light. It began with a 4!

43140. My mates didn't believe me. They reckoned I pinned it, then a week or so later it turned up again. Absolved.

It was the first of the Ivatt 4MTs to be allocated to Blyth, probably on a trial basis, in readiness for the demise of the Q6s. (The J27s continued right to the end). 43140 stayed at Blyth as a sole class representative from November until June 1965, when it mysteriously vanished. There were no more 4sers until 43101 and 43132 arrived in Nov 65. The pair soldiered on until the following August, when a flood of the class arrived, eventually totalling up to a dozen (max in one month 13) to see then through until the end.

When 45562 Alberta turned up on a special from Huddersfield to Ashington Colliery on 10th June 1967 every trainspotter in Ashington turned out to see the mythical beast.

 

Meanwhile, on the other coast at Lancaster, 'Sixers' were just as mythical! We might get a B1 into Morecambe on a bank holiday, but a trip to Preston on said BH could even bag me a V2 going to Blackpool. In the end, paper round money funded awaydays to Doncaster and York and lots more 'sixers' were underlined in the combine

 

Likewise down in Warrington, although summer saturdays produced interesting things from the far east on the line from Skelton Jct to Arpley.
That included B1s ( ORYX what's that and why do 4 letters need such a big nameplate ? ) and I remember at least one K1, folklore at Bank Quay also talked of a B12 once !

 

My paper money got me to Carlisle, where I was in time to see Scots Guardsman with other Scots, Jubes, a few Patriots and Coronations at the station, Kingmoor and Upperby. I have a mental image still of Scots Guardsman outlasting the other Scots and standing as a sole representative in a line of black 5s and 8Fs at the south side of Kingmoor through the summer of 1965.

 

Here's a photographic image of said loco at said depot, summer 1966.

 

Ha ha - snap! May 1966 after having been sold to KWVR.

 

I was under the impression that Scots Guardsman needed work on the inside cylinder due to an issue with the centre engine assembly.
Has it needed a new centre cylinder or is it still using the existing component?
Either way, it looks extremely handsome as newly outshopped!

Richard.