Preservation is about the whole picture, not just the star exhibits
BRITAIN’S standard gauge heritage fleet is on course to celebrate two landmarks this year. Once the test steamings of GWR 4-6-0 No. 6880 Betton Grange are completed, we will delight in the sight of the first class member at work for nearly six decades. Later this year, again all being well, the replica of LBSCR Brighton Atlantic No. 32424 Beachy Head will emerge on the Bluebell Railway. There is no doubt that both new-builds have immense crowd-pulling potential and will boost attendances at every venue they visit.
At the other end of the scale, however, the majority of an irreplaceable item of heritage traction is about to be scrapped.
As reported in News, page 26, one of only two surviving prewar EMUs still in original formation, Class 503 4SUB No. 4732, is now losing two of its three cars because its owner, the Heritage Electric Train Trust, has decided that it can no longer afford to restore them and will instead focus on saving just one driving car.
I fully understand and sympathise with the predicament that HETT has found itself in. Enthusiasm most often has no limits – but finance certainly does.
Steam has always been the predominant image of the railway preservation movement. By its very nature, electric traction comes a poor third in the minds of the general public. Unless a heritage electric locomotive or multiple unit can be passed for operation on the national tube network, it has nowhere else to run. It is highly unlikely that there will ever be a fully-fledged electric railway, and the best future that a preserved EMU can hope for is being locomotive-hauled stock. Yet, as a movement, we should – and indeed must – avoid the pitfall of saving just the ‘enticing’ parts of our rich railway heritage, while ignoring all aspects of the complete spectrum.
Here is where the Coventry Electric Railway Museum played a crucial role. But sadly, that venue is no longer with us, its collection of heritage stock having been dispersed to other sites in the hope of giving items the chance to survive. As with the complete Class 503 set, this is no longer the case, and as we closed for press, it was moved out of its current Margate home to meet its destiny. The set is a classic part of 20th-century Merseyside transport history and surely among that locality’s public guardians of heritage, there must have been a means of saving all three cars for the day when their value is fully appreciated by a future audience. As we reported last issue, separate moves are currently underway to save one of the last Merseyrail Class 507 EMUs.
Does nobody have an empty warehouse where such vehicles might be housed while restoration resources are amassed? It seems there is a crying need for a new national electric railway museum which could be developed as a major tourist attraction while also offering education and training facilities?
The heritage sector was still very much in its early stages when a largely-indifferent public paid little attention to the loss of the last Grange, a decision that future generations came to regret. We have achieved so much over the last 73 years since volunteers saved the Talyllyn Railway: let us not stand back and lose any of what we have saved so far – any of it – or we will come to regret the day.
“Let us not stand back and lose what we have saved so far – any of it – or we will come to regret the day.”