1948: BR’S FIRST YEAR
Britain may have been labouring under postwar austerity, but that did not mean that pomp and ceremony had been entirely abandoned. That much is evident in this scene at Nottingham Midland on September 18 1948, depicting the official rededication ceremony of rebuilt ‘Royal Scot’ No. 46112 Sherwood Forester. One can almost hear the excited murmuring from the assembled locospotters on the opposite platform, the fluttering of the bunting in the breeze and the rousing ceremonial music coming from the loudspeaker hanging over the locomotive’s smokebox. Originally built in 1927 to Sir Henry Fowler’s design, with a large, parallel boiler, No. 46112 was one of the first ‘Royal Scots’ to be rebuilt with the standard Stanier Type 2A tapered boiler in September 1943. The rebuilding programme, which was actually conducted under the auspices of Stanier’s successor H.G. Ivatt, would not be completed until 1955 – ironically, the same year that British Railways unveiled its Modernisation Plan with the intention of eradicating main line steam altogether.
That sombre future is a world away as Sherwood Forester, in gleaming, ex-works condition, comes off Nottingham shed on the morning of its rededication ceremony. The locomotive is in early British Railways lined black livery, and has yet to receive the distinctive curved smoke deflectors later fitted to rebuilds of the ‘Royal Scot, ‘Patriot’ and ‘Jubilee’ classes.
The more familiar BR passenger green, eventually applied to nearly every ‘Top Link’ locomotive in the post-‘Big Four’ era, would not be widely adopted until 1949.