Sun-soaked farewell to an icon of the Great Central
A MUCH-LOVED member of the Great Central Railway fleet bowed out of traffic in February and is now set to wait several years before it steams again.
As a child I used to raid my late father’s book collection. One of our favourite books was Main Line Lament by Colin Walker, a wonderful book charting the GWR through the BR era. One chapter looked at the Annesley to Woodford Runners, which Robert Riddles BR Standard 9F 2-10-0s came to dominate for nine years from 1956 until the traffic was moved away.
Colin wrote: “The sight of their 10-coupled driving wheels racing around and exhaust frothing above their smokeboxes before falling behind in a trail as long as their rattling bouncing trains was quite unforgettable”.
More than 30 9Fs were allocated to Annesley for the runners, which saw coal from Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire pits for London and the south of England and steel billets from Scunthorpe and Consett for South Wales. Loaded trains were pathed at 30mph and empties at 33mph, but the running was considerably quicker with engines working two round trips, sometimes three.
Modern-day
Fast-forward to February and the sound of a Riddles 9F on Great Central metals once again falls silent with the withdrawal of No. 92214. Built at Swindon in 1959 as one of the last batch of the class, its working life lasted just six years, most of its life in South Wales, although it was allocated to Bath Green Park in 1964.
Sold to Dai Woodham’s Barry scrapyard, in December 1980 it became the 117th engine to be rescued and was initially based at Peak Rail’s former Buxton base, returning to steam at the Midland Railway – Butterley in 2004. It has been resident at the GCR since 2014 and is now owned by the David Clarke Railway Trust.
With the current boiler certificate expiring, a farewell weekend was held on February 24/25, culminating with a last non-stop run from Leicester to Loughborough. One final steaming took place on February 26 for a photographic charter, the brainchild of GCR fireman and Tony’s Trains of Rugby owner Anthony French and run through my 30742 Charters.
Running with the GCR mixed freight set, the sold-out day saw 35 photographers treated to some fabulous runpasts which allowed us to imagine, if only for a 1/250th of a second, that we were back in the early 1960s!
There is something different about a goods working on a double-track main line. Watching No. 92214 work through the loops at Swithland, with a long trail of exhaust hanging in the air and the rhythmic sound of short wheelbase wagons drumming over rail joints, you get a sense of what the GCR was like when the runners were in their prime – and that is the power of preservation, recreating what seemed so ordinary at the time but has been missing from the railway scene for so long.
Weather show
What such send-offs can never control is the weather, but even that seemed to understand the occasion, providing cold temperatures and spells of glorious sunshine which culminated in double rainbows for the last runpasts past Kinchley Lane as the sun set (see centre spread, pages 54/55).
My thanks to the staff and volunteers of the GCR for a fabulous day.
A GCR statement said: “There are no plans to commence the overhaul on No. 92214 yet, and it will remain complete and on public display whenever possible.
“The 9F is likely to be out of traffic for a number of years while our engineering effort is focused on getting Britannia Pacific No. 70013 Oliver Cromwell and then the GCR O4 2-8-0 No. 63601 back in service.”