Memoirs of a Railway Volunteer - Part 12

To Buy An Engine.

Setting out to buy a second hand locomotive, especially a steam locomotive, is as risky as going out to buy a horse. It requires a lot more care than buying a second hand car. Generally warranties are neither asked for nor given, and devil take the hindmost. This is one area where enthusiast groups most definitely do not co-operate. Buying a locomotive is simply the entry ticket into a very expensive club. Ted Heath once tried to explain the joys of yachting to an outsider. He said it was like standing in a cold shower in the dark, tearing up twenty pound notes. Throw in a barrow load of rust, coal and ash, start a road drill, and that is steam locomotive preservation.

Back in 1979 I was a member of the Peak Railway Society, Mansfield Branch. The PRS had a grand plan called “Operation Rescue”, which involved the proposed purchase of ten locomotives from Woodham’s Scrapyard at Barry, which was the focal point of much of the preservation movement at that time. At the end of steam operations on British Railways in 1968, the Woodham Brothers had over two hundred locomotives in their yard, and stopped cutting them up. They sat there slowly decaying while enthusiasts tried to raise the money to purchase them.

The plan was, of course, hopelessly over ambitious. The PRS had nowhere to put them, no facility to restore them and nothing like the fundraising ability required. The competition to buy the best remaining engines was fierce, and it seemed that as soon as the PRS announced its latest target, someone else bought it. 42765, the Crab now at the East Lancs was one of the ones that got away. Dai Woodham operated a rudimentary reservation system, but it counted for nothing in the face of an open chequebook. Mansfield Branch proposed to buy 5668, an ex-GWR 0-6-2T, on the basis that each branch member would pay in 50p each week. It was going to be a long process, but we went ahead, and chartered a minibus to visit South Wales.

We obtained written permission from Dai Woodham in advance, he simply sent our letter back with “O.K. but no souvenirs” scrawled on it. In fact the yard was wide open, unfenced, and anyone could just stroll in. During our visit we came across four other working parties, all from different railways, and all busily removing parts. Almost all of the engines were heavily stripped, and 5668 was no exception. The only removable part still on the engine was, one main spring. No rods or motion, no brake gear, not even a chimney. We did our best to inspect and conserve it, someone poured a gallon of old engine oil down the blastpipe, to lubricate the cylinders, but I think we were all a bit stunned. I had brought a wire brush and my job was to go in the firebox and help clean it down ready for inspection. At least it didn’t have the acidic remains of an old fire in it, which many of the 28xx freight engines did. Later we were told that the engine had a cracked firebox, which in those days was seen as much more of a problem than it is now, and we gave up on the idea.

Eventually 5668 was purchased and went to South Wales. I understand that many spare parts have been obtained and now in 2008 serious work is about to start. If the restorers find the remains of an old wire brush in the firebox – they can keep it.

Private ownership seemed to offer better chances of success, and Brell Ewart and others bought 80080 and brought it back to Matlock, where work began in the old parcels shed. Later it was joined by 4936 Kinlet Hall. 34101 Hartland had already been purchased by Richard Shaw and was under restoration at his yard in Derby. Once some track had been laid at Buxton, two more Barry hulks were taken up there. One of them was 48624, and thereby hangs a tale. The original target was 48518, and quite a lot of work was done on that engine to conserve it. The original fundraising committee was a part of the PRS, but the members very wisely split off to form their own specialist group and concentrate their efforts. At a late stage 48518 was found to have serious firebox defects, and the group switched to 48624 instead. The inner box on 48518 was said to be quilted, which means that the copper had become overheated, and had bulged inwards around the stay heads. These days 48518 is one of the “Barry Ten”, and is to be cannibalised to help build a replica GWR “County” 4-6-0. The bit they want is the boiler, so I shall be interested to see how that idea works out in the end. The other was 92214, which was bought by Phil Brown and others, who formed a company with charitable status to restore it. Later Phil and his friends bought 92219, which remains unrestored in store at Butterley. Also at Buxton there was 3F 0-6-0T 47406, which was bought by the Rowsley Locomotives Trust, an organisation which never really got off the ground. That last locomotive was later sold and is now on the Great Central, where I believe the restoration is now well under way; when it arrived at Buxton it was in a worse state than 5668.

Finally there was 4MT 2-6-0 76084, bought privately by Phil Rollin, a Mansfield branch member who lived out near Retford. He kept it in his yard until he sadly died and his widow sold it. I believe it is currently destined for the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Now there is a story about that engine, which shows something of the atmosphere in which these rescues took place. Like all the others 76084 was badly stripped, and it was sold “missing parts included”, or words to that effect, which gave Phil authority to obtain the necessary bits as best he could, no questions asked. Dai Woodham had a very good idea where most of the missing parts were going, and took it all very philosophically. Once Phil had got his engine and got known to the other locomotive owners, contacts were made, and he was offered the chance to buy a set of coupling and connecting rods. He went where he was told, paid cash and took them home. When it came to cleaning them up, he found the engine number stamped onto them – 76084. It may very well be that these parts had been swapped to another engine during an overhaul; on the other hand perhaps not.

The problems which all owners of main line engines have to face sooner or later are first, that locomotive restoration and repair cannot be efficiently carried on in the open, and secondly that the engine must immediately start earning large sums of money to pay for the next overhaul. This combination generally forced the big engines off the railway, and the 8F group deserve considerable credit for sticking it out. Phil Brown and his group made particularly good use of the facilities at Butterley from 1990 onwards. I was invited to the first steaming of 92214 with many other Peak Rail veterans, and the workmanship on that engine was fantastic. You could have eaten your dinner off any part of the underside, and all the little hidden pipe runs, hundreds of yards of them, were dead straight and parallel. A lot of standard loco owners were there and they all agreed this was one of the best restorations so far.

Also in around 1980, I made the acquaintance of an enthusiast in Worksop called Gordon Bennett. He got the ridiculous notion that he was going set up a scheme to buy a big diesel electric, and so the North Notts Loco Group was formed, of which I was one of the founder members. One Saturday morning, Gordon and I set out to visit the Sheffield scrapyards in search of wagon plates, which we both sold in support of our various schemes. Gordon apologized for being a little dopey that day, he said he had just come off a twelve hour night shift! With that kind of determination behind it the NNLG made solid progress, and settled on the idea of buying a class 25 diesel electric. This attracted a certain amount of jealousy from an existing class 25 preservation group who had been appealing for money for some time; they were particularly upset when they realised that Gordon and his group had raised more money than they had in a much shorter period of time.

Eventually the NNLG settled on a particular locomotive at Toton. After inspecting it they jammed the doors on the inside and climbed out through the roof, in the hope of putting of any other potential buyers. That did not work and they were outbid.

The NNLG continued to raise money, and so were ready to take the opportunity of buying the Class 44 Pen-y-gent some time later.

Back to the main thread of the narrative. In the early nineteen eighties we were slowly and painfully building up our site at Buxton. We had a couple of Barry Hulks, and a few miscellaneous diesel shunters. What we needed was a small working steam locomotive.

At this point we recruited a bearded activist by the name of Martyn Ashworth, who had been a volunteer on the Worth Valley Railway for many years. Martyn was a key figure in the locomotive preservation world, a fixer with fingers in many pies around the country. To give an idea of the breadth and speed of his contacts, one weekend when I was living in the Northeast, I mentioned that an acquaintance of mine, called Eric “Max” Maxwell was about to import a two foot gauge engine from Utrillas in Spain for the Tanfield Railway. I had no sooner got back to County Durham on Sunday night when I got a call from someone on the West Lancashire Railway, asking for Max’s phone number. As a result, the West Lancs bought two engines from Utrillas themselves. Martyn was also a genial social companion who could charm the birds off the trees, as a result of which many of us found ourselves doing things we would never otherwise have dreamed of or dared to do.

An operator like Martyn had no difficulty in finding locomotives for sale. An enthusiast, I think his name was Mr Hall, had set up a private operation at the old station at Delph, which is somewhere on the Northeast side of Manchester. He had one hundred yards of track, one coach, one wagon, one brake van, and one steam locomotive, which was a Hunslet 15” 0-6-0ST called Brookes No.1. It was not a sustainable operation, and the locomotive was for sale with a current boiler ticket at a very reasonable price. Martyn then went sniffing about for the money, at which point I mentioned that the Mansfield Branch, of which I was chairman, was sitting on about £2000.

That was quite a sum of money back in 1982, and represented a lot of hard work by Mansfield branch members who sold instant lottery cards and organised two big leisure exhibitions. Also at this time, there was a big Hunslet diesel at Buxton, which had been bought in excellent condition very cheaply. This Martyn now sold at a profit and the combined funds were enough to buy and transport Brookes No.1. With the luxury of hindsight I am inclined to think we should have tried harder to keep the diesel, which was nearly brand new and would have been very useful at Darley Dale six years later.

Brookes No.1 was a lovely little engine and hauled the first passenger train into our new passenger platform at Buxton. Later, when the boiler ticket expired, the boiler was beyond our abilities to repair and was sold on. She would have been too small for our current main line duties. She has since been fitted with a new boiler and has just been returned to her original appearance at the Middleton Railway, recent photographs of her in the railway press have brought back some happy memories for Buxton veterans like me.

Another engine which arrived in 1983 was a much better long term proposition, an ex-NCB 0-6-0ST built by Bagnalls of Stafford to the Hunslet Austerity design, works No 2746. It was initially bought from Acton Hall colliery by an enthusiast who lived in Wakefield and I saw it delivered to Buxton one murky Saturday in October. At that time, road deliveries took place alongside the goods shed on the siding known as Cyprus Road, so called because in the old days this was where the fruit vans with produce from Cyprus used to be unloaded. It was fairly steeply inclined and we pulled the new arrival off using Brookes No.1 and a barrier wagon. Gravity rapidly took over on a damp rail, and No. 2746 shoved its smaller relative backwards for the full length of the goods shed.

Now, the point about the Austerity tanks is that they were designed as short trip engines, and not merely as yard shunters. Take a look at Zebedee, RSH No 7597 also based at Peak Rail, for example. This is a pure bred power station shunter, small wheels for maximum traction, outside cylinders and a short wheelbase. The object was to shunt block coal trains from the exchange sidings to the wagon tippler at slow speed. No attempt was made to balance the motion properly, so driving it over 15 mph would lead to a very bad ride. During its spell at the Bodmin and Wenford Railway, 3cwt of lead was cast into the drivers, which improved matters but there were still times when soup had to be taken off the menu in the dining car. The small wheels mean a relatively high number of stress cycles per mile, so the mechanical maintenance bills go up. Thus, in the current repair of Zebedee, it has been found that the driving wheels are so worn that we were lucky to escape fitting new tyres are required and I have no doubt that the rear axleboxes will also be in a state, and other components such as side rod brasses and crankpins. The engine was in good order when purchased in late 2000. I remember back in 2002, Mike Fairburn used to shake his head over this engine being driven at speed. He doubted whether the footplate experience courses were covering their costs in the long run and also requested a reduction in the trailing load until the mechanical wear could be corrected; he was overruled.

The Austerity is a very different proposition. Its ancestry goes back to a pair of side tanks built for the Pontop and Jarrow Railway (later known as the Bowes Railway) which ran for several miles through County Durham. Hunslet also built a batch of 3F tanks for the LMS, from which they appropriated the cylinder patterns, motion and foundation ring. At least one 3F has been restored with Austerity motion parts. The design progressed through the 50550 class ironstone engines, and was reworked for war service in the simplest and most robust manner possible. Apparently three men and two apprentices could assemble one in a week using machined parts from stock. The design specification was to move over 1000 tons on the level, but the wheels are relatively large for an industrial, the motion is well balanced, and the inside cylinders give a relatively low twisting moment. An Austerity in good order will run smoothly at over 30 mph – not a good idea in the long term, but it will do it.

Our friend from Wakefield rapidly dismantled his engine, and the frames were traversed across to the blind side of the goods shed. We got them off the through road with traversing jacks, which took about two days. He also set to cutting the tubes out of the boiler with a gas cutter. That is fine in the copper firebox, where the copper conducts the heat away and is left unharmed. It requires a lot of skill to avoid damaging the steel smokebox tubeplate, and this was left notched in several places. He was involved in the 80080 group, and when they moved to Butterley his plans changed, and 2746 was put on the market in its dismantled state. We were frantically trying to put together a consortium ourselves as buyers began to come around to look at the engine. The frames were a bit of a puzzle for them. “How on earth did they get over here?” Helpless shrugs all round. They thought a bit and came up with a solution “We shall spin them through 90 degrees and take them out through the side door”. Look at your boots and try not to smile. I don’t know what they offered, but our bid of £6,000 was accepted. My initial share was one third, just about all my life savings at that time. The initial owners were Roy Syrett, Doc Humpston and Ken Day as well as me. We also had a loan from Phil Brown, which was mostly repaid by myself. My current stake in the engine is around 45%.

The engine came with just about a full set of brasswork, except for the vacuum brake system. The first problem to sort out was the boiler. The tubes had been dropped down inside the boiler, and the cut ends ran into slaggy blobs due to the gas cutting process. They were now too fat to go through the holes in the tubeplates.

The solution was to go into the boiler, cut the tubes in half, and pass them out through the regulator shaft, which is easier said than done. Fortunately I had the services of a volunteer known as Pycost, who was just thin enough to fit between the top longitudinal stays. He got his name by not paying attention to what Martyn Ashworth was saying one day. Martyn was getting ready for a job and told him to get items A, B, C, and a Pycost.

“What’s a Pycost?”

“Seventy pence – here’s a couple of quid, I’ll have pie and chips for lunch”. Sooner him than me, the local chippy was known as “the multi-coloured slop shop” and was famous for the grey/black blotches on the underside of its pies.

I promise to buy Pycost a great deal of beer, and did so in due course – after the tubes had been cut. I didn’t want him getting fat. Attending to the tubes was the last job on the engine in which I was physically involved. I made the mistake, at one of the volunteers meetings, of saying it was about time we had an organised campaign to sort the track out. They all looked at me and I was mostly occupied with permanent way duties from that time forwards, and I left the restoration to the volunteers in the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Manpower Services Commission trainees. I think the railway did reasonably well out of the exchange.

Mostly occupied, but not completely. In those days Buxton was a social phenomenon as much as a railway centre, and that was largely due to the influence of Martyn Ashworth and his contacts. Working parties were always fitting out for another expedition, locomotive parts were dropped off for collection by others passing through, there was always something outlandish going on. Go in the back shop at Buxton and you might find a pile of superheater bottle ends bound for the Worth Valley, Bulleid grate elements going the other way, or even bits being made for the narrow gauge locomotive “Palmerston”. The latter was at least partly owned by Mike Hart, who later became general manager of the ffestiniog railway, and Martyn’s contact with him led to a number of useful episodes, arising out of Mike’s position at Thomas Hill’s who were making diesel shunters. For example, there was the time when we met up in York to assemble a panel of track in a hotel car park, for a brand new diesel shunter to stand on at a trade exhibition. We spent the day telling every passer by that this was the start of the new York Metro – and so many of them believed us. By the end of the day the locals were about to form a protest group. One tough looking gentleman addressed us in a Scottish accent. He was a circuit judge who had just finished trying scrap thieves for the theft of railway chairs and was curious to see what they really looked like up close. Apparently the chairs had been identified by the foundry marks…I made a rapid examination of my conscience and found it clear, phew.

Martyn was now Mechanical Engineering Director and was very keen to build up a workshop at a minimal cost. At the time I was running a solicitors branch office in Spennymoor, Co Durham. One Friday night I was just about to lock up for the weekend when I saw that the switchboard light was flashing. I put the call through and it was Martyn. He got straight to the point.

“There’s a lorry leaving Sheffield at five o’clock tomorrow morning. Be on it.”
I pumped him for further details. There was an operation running at RESCO in Woolwich, which was shutting down, we had received an offer at short notice which was far too good to refuse. Fuzzy Martin was taking a pick up down with Mad Mick – all hands on deck and that meant me as well.

I got home to Durham, and rang Martin to get directions to his home in Oughtibridge before hurriedly loading the car. I got there late at night and crashed out on his sofa. Early in the morning we picked up Mick and set out for London.

Now, RESCO (The Railway Engineering Supply Co.) was just about the first attempt to set up a specialist railway engineering company for the heritage end of the market, and it was perhaps a little ahead of its time. It did some notable work, particularly the construction of the replica broad gauge “Iron Duke”. It also restored a rake of heritage carriages for a private owner and overhauled the Ivatt 2-6-2 tank for the Worth valley. After that and a few more, the supply of paying contracts dried up and the company ceased trading. A leading light in the company was Mike Hart, who also had quite a fleet of standard gauge engines. He had previously been involved with the Kent and East Sussex Railway where he was involved in rebuilding the New Mills Channel bridge. The brief was, that the Woolwich industrial estate was chronically insecure and the site was to be stripped. The modern tools were to go to Thomas Hills, in a hurry. We were to supply the labour, and in exchange we were to get anything else we chose to cart away.
We got to Woolwich by about nine in the morning and we were the first ones there. The factory was locked, but we could see rolling stock in the yard, including the Hunslet 0-6-0 Hastings from the KESR (It had a stablemate, Charwelton. The latter was restored at Resco, including fitting a new axle, but what happened to Hastings?). We waited a while, but nothing happened. I got bored and set out to climb the gate, which was about eight feet high. At this point the police arrived, and were distinctly curious. Fortunately Mike Hart turned up a moment afterwards, in a Jaguar if memory serves me right. The reason for the police presence was the high crime level. Recently thieves had simply driven a lorry straight through the wall of a nearby factory and pillaged it – and that was why the salvage operation was being organised at such short notice.

The yard contained a fascinating collection of odd stuff. Apart from the dismantled hulk of Hastings, there was a stripped down SECR brake van, and the grounded teak body of an ECJS sleeping car, which I had previously seen at Tenterden. Inside this was cracked and faded, but seemed to be completely intact. It had been sawn into two halves, I understand this remarkable survivor is now in the care of Stephen Middleton at Embsay.

The really valuable stuff was inside a factory building and Mike gave us a guided tour. In his office was a largely complete beyer-garratt in about 3 1/2 inch gauge. Apparently the chap who was building it died and his widow put the chassis up for sale to tidy her house at last. Mike bought it on spec, and while he was clearing up the bits, came across an invoice for a boiler, dated about twenty years before. He contacted the boilermaker, and yes it had never been collected, was still on their premises and would he like to take the thing off their hands at the 1965 price?

Around this time Martyn arrived with the rest of the gang in cars and a forty foot articulated lorry. The modern equipment for Thomas Hills went onto the pickup, and the obsolete stuff for Buxton went on the lorry, which was fully loaded. This included several crates full of machine tools and drill bits and quite a lot of pneumatic riveting hammers, several dozen in fact, steel stock, and various bits of J94 brake gear left over from building Iron Duke. Mike pointed out what we could and could not have, and left us to our own devices while he returned to Yorkshire. Under Martyn’s direction the volunteers swarmed over the works like an army of ants.

The prize part of the haul was an enormous quantity of machine tool bits, which had once been used for making steam locomotives at Ashford works on the Southern. The drill bits came in all sizes from about 4” diameter downwards, with thread taps to match.

The real mischief began when we tried to load a large pillar drill, using the ancient site crane. This was a diesel contraption on four wheels, and it didn’t like the pillar drill at all. There is an identical drill sat on a flat wagon at Rowsley – the blue one not the really big green one, and I should guess it weighed about four tons. The crane could lift it, just, but couldn’t lower it in a controlled manner. The weight was too much for the hoist brake, and the front wheels were squashed down by the weight, so the crane looked like it might topple forwards.

We got in a huddle and made a plan. Mad Mick, who was driving, either disconnected the overload bell or literally put a sock in it. Somebody measured the height of the trailer, and the rest of us, about a dozen, climbed on the back of the crane and clung to the counterweight to add ballast. Then the crane set to lift the drill to the right height, which took several attempts as it was all or nothing on the throttle. When it was about right we backed the trailer underneath, jammed in a few bits of packing under the drill and let go. The trailer settled pretty drastically on its springs, but all was well.
In the luxury of hindsight you may well say this was dangerous, that the crane could have gone over, or the cable could have snapped at any moment, and we might all have been killed. I can only reply, we knew that very well, and we were laughing fit to bust. Forgive us, we were much younger then, and that spirit of utter determination built a railway against considerable odds. Moral: time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted. If we’d had time to check the place out first we would have made sure to get a better crane.

Martyn took his troops off to Buxton with the lorry, we returned to Sheffield and I slept on the couch once again. On Sunday morning we called at Thomas Hills to meet Mike Hart and drop off their share of the salvage. There we were greeted by Mike Fairburn, who was also working for Thomas Hills at that time. I already knew Mike from visits to the Welsh Highland at Portmadoc, and he was actually working on bits for the 2-6-2T Russell, side tanks if memory serves me correctly. Bits of Palmerston were also on the premises. The WHR and the ffestiniog had been at feud for several years, and here were two senior supporters of the opposite sides happily working on their respective projects in the same workshop! Mike Fairburn (that makes three Mikes in one weekend, do you wonder why we have nicknames?) gave us a guided tour and we left for home.

And the pillar drill? Well, it saw a certain amount of use, but by the time Buxton was cleared we had two the same size and the other one was thought to be the better of the pair, so the Woolwich drill went for scrap. The survivor was greased up and is currently under repair for use in Rowsley Shed. The drill bits, on the other hand were much easier to move and to store and they lived on, first in the goods shed at Matlock, then in the container, and later in the S& T stores, which they share with several trays of bolts and other items which also came from Woolwich. Shortly they will be moved up to the new shed at Rowsley and then we’ll see how much life there is left in them.

We had a further contact with Thomas Hill’s later when we built a 5’6” gauge test track at Buxton for three diesel which were built for export to India. Martyn wanted to borrow the Pakistan Railways 4-4-0 from Manchester Museum and run it but couldn’t find a sponsor for the cost, which was rather a shame.

Back to the Duke. Fortunately the locomotive had received a mechanical overhaul to a good standard during its NCB service. The axles were parallel and the side play and general tolerances were good; cylinder bores were round and pointing in the right direction, slidebars straight and true. The frames basically needed cleaning and painting. However there were bills to pay from time to time. Martyn had many useful contacts and arranged for the wheels to be turned by Bagueley’s at Stoke, and ordered a new smokebox door. I bought a pair of safety valves from an enthusiast who manufactures them. We paid regular sums by standing order to meet these costs, and I would pass on the invoices to Ken Day who acted as treasurer. The company also obtained financial assistance from High Peak Borough Council, who made a grant of £4,000 towards the repair costs in order to provide training experience for the MSC workers.

As the engine was privately owned, we had to have the paperwork to cover the qualifying conditions for the grant, and Martyn and I adapted one of Roger Horne’s standard agreements, to the effect that the Company would have free use of the locomotive for up to ten years, on condition that it was put back into working order at the end of that time.

One particularly useful member of the MSC team was a coded welder known as Hamish . Coded welders have the paperwork to repair pressure vessels, and Hamish dealt with the notched tubeplate. The problem is normally that to deal with a notched tubeplate, only a few holes can be dealt with each day, to avoid overstressing the metal. If we had brought in an outside welder on that basis this repair would have been very expensive.

The work progressed as we could afford it, and towards the end we brought in two new members to top up our funds, Terry Perkins (since bought out) and Tony Joyce. Finally things got to the point where the frames could be traversed back across the shed. This would have taken four or five men most of a day’s hard work to accomplish. We had four traversing jacks, and the method was, first to pack the bottom of the axlebox keepers, to stop the wheels dropping down, and then to jack the frames up one end at a time with hydraulic jacks and packing. Next get the traversing jacks underneath, one at each corner, and remove the packing. The team would take up their positions, one man to each jack with a handle or a spanner, and one man to call the time. The traversing jacks operated by means of a vertical screw jack sitting on a horizontal slide, operated by a large worm screw. Turning the screw drives over with a spanner would slide the engine bodily sideways, perhaps an eighth of an inch at a time.

Now the point was that the screw jacks had to be kept perfectly vertical, so all the jacks had to move in unison and by exactly the same amount. To make life a little interesting, one of the jacks had a worm with a sharper pitch on its thread, and if the operator got carried away, his jack would travel more than the others. This would produce loud creaks and bangs, and several tons of locomotive would start swaying about in a fairly alarming manner. Once the swaying stopped, the other three jacks would catch up, and orderly progress resumed. The jacks had a travel of about a foot, so when the limit of progress was reached, the team had to set up the packings, jack up the engine, reverse the traversing jacks, remove the packings once more and then set off again. The total distance to travel was about twelve feet. All good healthy exercise.

The work progressed surely, if slowly. The same team were working on the Manning Wardle 0-6-0ST Arthur and on many other projects. The cab and tanks were shotblasted, a new ashpan was fabricated and the boiler went back into the frame towards the end of October 1987. The springs went back on for Christmas and the cladding tanks and cab had been refitted by the following May. The locomotive was painted in a plain black livery and looked very well in it. Finally, a test steaming took place on Sunday, 25th September, 1988. I had just finished the salvage operation at Gridweld, and I think I was too shattered to take much notice. I do remember the next steaming however, on Monday 17th October The Duke was steamed to help launch the share issue, and the Duke of Devonshire appeared on the footplate. I think it was towards the end of that day that Martyn asked me up onto the footplate after the fire had been dropped, and I drove the Duke into the shed on the last of the steam in the boiler. Now I come to think of it, that remains the only time I have ever driven the engine. The Duke became a regular performer on the short Buxton site shuttle.

Once the ordeal of the Buxton site sale was over, The Duke was delivered to Darley Dale. We had been offered very generous terms to take the engine elsewhere, but felt that we had to stay with Peak Rail. It remained the only engine suitable for steam passenger working, and I hoped it would soon be required for crew training. Andy Lynch, a qualified marine engineer, and Fred Morton, an ex Rowsley shed fitter looked the engine over, and it became apparent that some of the work done by the MSC, who were willing but essentially unskilled, would have to be re-done. The brass washout plugs had been overtightened to prevent leaks, and the taper threads had been mashed in the process. Some of the pipework needed to be re-made, but the biggest problem was weeping stays. The stays themselves had become necked, i.e. narrowed by corrosion, so the only solution was to crane the boiler out of the frames and send it away for repair, I think to Barlows of Warrington, who were a very reputable company at that time. I don’t know if they are still trading. I think the stays cost a further £4000, the work being paid for by the company on the basis that the ten years free use would now run from that time.

The Duke was first steamed after these repairs on 9th January 1991 and ran to Matlock. It passed its final insurance company tests in March of that year and entered regular service, in which it performed reliably with little maintenance until 2001, it is now stored until the PLC can afford the overhaul. During that time I estimate it was in steam for at least 100 days per year, and considering the average market rate through that time was £200 per day, and the actual charge was nil, Peak Rail PLC have not done badly out of the arrangement. Work is due to start when Zebedee is finished. When it is carried out, the railway will once again have the benefit of a very useful engine.

Tim

 

Id been waiting for the next installment!!! Fantastic!!!

Thank you very much Tim, I really enjoy reading your stories as do im sure alot of others.

keep them coming! I hope you decide to publish as i for one would immeadiately snap up a copy

 

... and no reference to the whistle that i sold you!

 

Superb, Tim. Just superb. Please keep it up. I will also be buying a copy when the book comes out.

Regards,

jtx

 

Same here !!!

 

Now that is an account!!!!

Hastings, having left RESCO, went back to the KESR. She sat, dismantled, in a field at Rolvenden for a number of years. Actually, the boiler didn't even make it to Rolvenden, and was unceremoniously "parked" in Witt Road yard for years. After being allowed to sit and stew for so long, she was sold, and has moved to Mangapps Farm, where I understand she is under restoration. Incidentally, she is there keeping company with "Minnie", the Fox Walker engine that was parked at Northiam for ages, until she too moved on.

 

Tim.

If you're thinking of putting it together in a book form I would be happy to help get it sorted for you, running a print business and having done many books for various authors, including a number for the Industrial Railway Society!

Cheers

 

Absolutely riveting. No pun intended.
You can put me on the list to buy a copy if you do decide to put it into a book.
Many thanks for the insight into the early days of preservation.

 

Agree with all the above! Thanks for shareing your memories, I always like to hear or read of old steam days, & this is a modern version of them! Well done.