Your greatest ever steam locomotive spectacle

Rottweil in 2014 seven locomotives in steam ,four of them giving footplate rides an two on the mainline doing the parallel running . And 97 501 showing how her cylinders for the rack and pinion lines work

 

Not sure if this is my greatest ever, but it's right up there....

The KESR gala, a few years ago, where we advertised 9 loco's in a cavalcade on the Saturday morning. Given that, at the time, we had a problem with engines not always being available when advertised, I thought it was brave. On the morning, it really was a case of cross your fingers and pray. I was on the end of Tenterden platform when the cavalcade came into sight. No, it wasn't 9 engines. It was 10!!! The spare loco, 24, had been stuffed on the back, and came up with the yard foreman driving. It was a wonderful feeling that we had aimed high, then surpassed even that. That was the start of a damn good day.

 

Mainline - watching a Brit' going flat out through IIRC Reading (small boy back then so perhaps more impressive than it really was). 9Fs on the Fawley oil trains through Shawford, especially if they had been held in the Allbrooke loop. Watching Mallard on an end of steam run in the high 90s westbound through Andover (speed as per Rly Mag log). Clan Line southbound through Shawford with the Belle set in July '67 which I'm sure somewhere I have seen a log saying was 103mph.

Preservation - stewarding an NELPG tour that had just about everything go wrong so was way late by Leeds, but with Lord Nelson up front we did Leeds - York in something like 22 mins. Memory may be wrong now as I haven't the log but it was certainly faster than my regular commute on same line with the Class 47s. Also footplate work as a trainee on the NYMR and more recently with a footplate experience pass with Bittern over the Mid-Hants.


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