TO HULL AND BACK – PART 1
Tom Tighe’s 50 years in preservation
For the last half century, Tom Tighe has devoted his life to steam preservation.
Since joining the nucleus gang of volunteers who had set to work on ‘Black Five’ No. 45305 in September 1969, Tom has overseen several overhauls and restorations on a variety of favourites, including ‘V2’ Green Arrow, ‘King Arthur’ Sir Lamiel and ‘Britannia’ Oliver Cromwell.
And yet, it’s the ‘Five’ that has always remained his pet engine. Small wonder, given that its forthcoming overhaul, which falls in 2020, will be the fifth that he has led. In fact, Tom has cared for ‘Fifty-three O five’ for 19 years more than it was in LMS and BR service combined.
“People say ‘you’re married to that engine’. I probably am,” he freely admits.
Like most enthusiasts, Tom’s love of steam was forged at an impressionably young age in the early 1950s.
“I suppose it came from being walked to Thorne Moor level crossings by my sister when I was about one or two years old and being dumped by the lineside to watch the trains go by. She always claims that’s all I wanted to do, even at that age. But I don’t believe her!
“We lived in a little village called Moor Ends, near Doncaster and the Doncaster-Hull line was probably half a mile from the house.
“We later moved two miles to a small town called Thorne, where you had the Doncaster-Hull line to the north and the Doncaster-Immingham line to the south; serving Thorne Moor North and South, so I was never far from railways… ‘O4s’, ‘Austerities’, ‘B1s’, ‘K1s’, all sorts.
“From the age of 12, I used to go further afield. I never used to tell my parents; I just used to say I’m going to Doncaster. In reality, I used to spread my wings and go to Manchester and Newcastle.”
One of these forays in 1965 took him to Darlington, where he ventured to Bank Top shed.
“I was just about to enter, and the foreman came hurtling out of his office and told me to go away in no uncertain terms. I pleaded with him, but he said: ‘if you’d come and asked, before just trying to go in, I might have let you round’. I took that with a pinch of salt because I thought ‘you look like a nasty piece of work to me’!
“But I wanted one ‘A1’ at the time – 60151 Midlothian
– one of the last survivors. It was a Gateshead engine, so I got to Newcastle and got a train to Gateshead West and walked to the shed. The problem was that as soon as you got in, you were in full view of anyone who might be watching. But at that young age I didn’t have a care. “As soon as I got in, the foreman nabbed me.”
But perseverance paid off, and Tom did finally see his prize target by scaling a high wall, set behind a public convenience. “There was Midlothian, sat there in steam. Nothing else. Brill.”
DONNY DAYS
As well as spending nights on stations touring the last vestiges of North Eastern Region steam, Tom also just managed to see the last rites of Southern action in June 1967. That was the month before it ended; the same time that he left school, aged 15, to join British Rail’s Doncaster Works as an apprentice fitter.
“I did a year in the training school before going into the works. We did the rounds in the machine shop. A lot of the work was not very glamorous. They certainly made sure you were proficient using an engineer’s file.
“I remember going into the hot brass shop and they did all manner of things, like the aluminium dummy connections on vac hoses. They had a machine that
churned them out by the hundreds. There were big wire cages full of them and you’d have to file off the flashing off them – week in, week out.”
Despite having narrowly missed out working on steam locomotives, Tom was nonetheless immersed in a world of voices, experience and memories of the age.
“You had a lot of people who had served their time on the LNER. The foremen were people you had to respect.
“In Four Bay, there was a gentleman by the name of George Hewitson who wore a pin-stripe suit and a trilby hat. If you saw him coming, you made sure you were working. If he saw you standing talking and then you saw him, you’d think ‘did he see me?’ He would walk past and say ‘morning’. Then he’d stop. And if he stopped, you knew he was going to give you a b ***** king. He’d turn round and come back with something short and sweet. All you’d say is ‘yes Mr Hewitson’.
“Like any job, it had good bits, but also crap bits. “The dismantling shop was probably the worst place. You had engines that came in absolutely filthy and it was always the threat, if you’d done something you shouldn’t, you’d be banished into the dismantling shop as a punishment. It was a hell hole.”
FIRST ENCOUNTER
But thoughts of steam were never far from Tom’s mind.
“On August 3 1968, I did the last three sheds with two lads I used to go spotting with. We were at Lostock Hall and bumped into a few people. I can remember us talking about what engines might get saved for preservation. Not that we knew much about preservation.
“You’d see a clean engine and wonder whether it would get preserved, just on the basis it looked in good nick. 45305 came into that category that day. We were stood close to it at Lostock Hall with [‘8F’ No.] 48476 next to it. After that, I never gave it a thought.
“The following week, on the weekend of the ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’, we were going round Barry scrapyard. That’s when it started to hit home that there were 200-odd engines and a number were starting to be reserved. At that point it started to stick in my mind, and I was thinking, ‘do I get involved?’
“It wasn’t until May 1969 that there was a little piece in ‘Railway Mag’ about Draper’s deciding to preserve the ‘Five’. I didn’t get across to Hull until September 1969. That’s when I first went to Neptune Street Yard and that’s when I saw it parked up against the bufferstops.”
The 1937, Armstrong Whitworth-built ‘5MT’ had been pardoned by scrap dealer Albert Draper, who’d cut up 742 other locomotives, but wanted to keep one as a memento of that work. ‘5305’ was famously chosen because it was the cleanest in the yard.
“There were three lads: Brian Edgan, Ian Scott and Pete Caress. They were there just keeping it clean and getting bits off other engines to replace bits that had been taken off 5305, so it was all complete.
“I initially just went to have a look, and they said ‘do you want to join us?’ ‘Yeah, I’d love to’. It just went from the four of us to a gang of about 12.”
Remarkably, to modern eyes, the initial voluntary effort didn’t have a definitive aim.
“There’s only so much you can do trying to clean and polish an engine in a scrapyard before it gets a bit boring. The engine was a runner until August 1968, so I thought it surely wouldn’t take much to get it running again, and it was discussed among the guys.
“That was put to Draper’s and they gave us the blessing to try and achieve it, and it was at that point that we started to look at it more seriously and see what we could do.”
The Humberside Locomotive Preservation Group was born and Tom’s growing engineering experience quickly led to his leadership of the organisation.
“Draper’s paid for a set of small tubes and other bits and bobs. Then it got to the point where you were still in the scrapyard, with piles of scrap all around you, so we were limited with what we could achieve. I thought that there was no way we could re-tube it there.
“We’d done a fair bit. We’d had the pistons out, crossheads split, gutted the small tubes from the boiler. What you could do on a weekend was a bit limited, particularly in the open.
“We’d cover the engine up as best we could. We’d made the cab so there was only one way you could access it and you had to know exactly what to do, to prevent theft. It was a priority to find somewhere if we wanted to bring it to a successful conclusion.
“One summer, Draper’s brought in square blocks of used, crushed food tins that had contained meat, peas and carrots. They were having to stockpile steel because the price had plummeted, and these blocks were piled just in front of where the locomotive was.
“Well, you can imagine how it was in a hot summer. There were millions of flies and wasps – it was absolutely horrendous. They were everywhere.
“Needless to say that was a summer when not a lot of work got done.
“There wasn’t enough room in the scrapyard for a shed to house the locomotive, but in 1974, the depot engineer
Some of them thought I was bonkers, and I probably was. I just thought, we’ll keep at it
at Dairycoates, Cedric Lodge (now a driver at the Welsh Highland Railway) mentioned the old crane shed, which was disused. We wondered if we could make some overtures to see if we could rent that.
“We wrote to the property board at York to see if we could rent the crane shed. What we paid for it was peanuts. Mind you, it had to be – we didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together.”
The ‘Black Five’ finally moved into the 150ft long building, complete with pit and smoke hood, in December 1973.
“There was no electricity. When we moved in, the lads said ‘we can only work here in daylight’. I said, if we have to, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way and we’ll get a load of big candles; that’s what they used in the works in GNR days for close-up work as a cost-saving exercise. So that’s how we worked for the first six months.”
“All the while, at Doncaster Works, I was talking to ex-steam lads and they were giving me more encouragement – saying how worthwhile it was. Some of them thought I was bonkers though, and I probably was. I just thought, we’ll keep at it.”
“I think most of the works knew what I was up to. They were fetching tools out of lockers that probably hadn’t seen the light of day for years. And it was all tools and stuff they used to use when they were on steam.
“Over the years, people would come to me and say they’d opened a cupboard up and found a load of gear. In the boiler maintenance team’s cabin were loads of tool lockers. They said, ‘come down because there’s all sorts in here’. They smashed the locks off and opened them up: there were riveting hammers, caulking tools, riveting
sets, big spanners. It was a gold mine. My eyes must have stood out on stalks when I saw them.
“All I had to do was pay five shillings and remove it. It was worth hundreds. There was no end of stuff.”
“I found out that Dairycoates’ wagon shops used to send their lorry to the Doncaster stores twice a week. I knew the guy who drove the lorry, so I’d have a word with him on the weekend when we were in Hull. I asked him to come see me at the weighhouse on the day he was coming in the next week. I had cupboards in the weighhouse that I used to stuff full of purchases and he used to take them to Dairycoates.
“There were loads of steam-era oil bottles and BR Eastern Region oil feeders, so I kept my eyes on them. When they stopped using them, I was straight in.
“The Smiths 100mph speedo that’s now on the ‘Five’ used to be on a dexion rack in the gauge section. They used it to calibrate speedos on diesels. It came off ‘A1’ 60152 Holyrood. The day they swapped over to the new digital system, I was on nights and this speedo was looking all lonesome, so I thought, I’ll come back with my spanners and liberate it.”
FIVE FINISHED
“In June 1976, it steamed. It was a good day and it made it all worthwhile.”
Confidence among the HLPG team grew. So much so that thoughts turned to taking on another project.
“In September 1976 we went to the National Railway Museum to ask if there was an engine we could borrow. [Keeper] John Coiley was noncommittal in his answers. Even John Bellwood [Chief Mechanical Engineer] said ‘don’t hold your breath’.
“The NRM finally wrote to me to say that they might be able to consider letting us have [‘King Arthur’] Sir Lamiel, which was at Ashford Steam Centre at the time.”
The centre had closed in May 1976 with crippling debts, leaving the future of its residents in doubt.
“It seemed to take forever getting it out: there were all sorts of issues. At one point, John Bellwood said to me ‘would you accept the ‘Schools’?’ [Cheltenham] to which I replied: ‘I’d sooner have ‘Lamiel’.
“It wasn’t long after that John arranged to get ‘Lamiel’ out of Ashford and up to Doncaster in June 1978. I went to the shed after someone rang me to say “that engine’s here, what you’re havin’.
“It was the first time I’d ever seen it. Two days later, it was delivered to Hull.”
But soon after ‘Lamiel’ arrived in its foreign environment, Tom was thrown a curveball.
“John Bellwood said to me ‘would you like to take on a ship?’” To which Tom’s response was simply: ‘You what?’
The NRM was considering the LNER paddle steamer Lincoln Castle following its withdrawal, and it was moored in the dock alongside Draper’s yard in Hull.
“They were having all sorts of problems with the Humber Paddle Steamer Group. John didn’t think much of them because they were totally disorganised.
“I told him, ‘Yeah, it would be different, but I think I’ve got enough else on’ and it wasn’t long after that the museum dropped its plans and it was sold to a Hull businessman who turned it into a bar.”
Sadly, the 1940 vessel was eventually scrapped.
SCARBOROUGH FARE
Back on terra firma, No. 5305 was launched on the network in 1977, having taken eight years to rebuild, including connecting rods acquired from Barry that originally belonged to No. 45293.
“We had two main line trips that year and the hire fees were peanuts – hundreds not thousands. It got better year on year, but you weren’t earning thousands of
pounds, and when the overhaul was due, you didn’t have tens of thousands in the bank. You had about enough to buy a set of tubes and get on with it.”
After that lean start, the advent in 1978 of a new series of repeat itinerary trains centred on York would change everything: the ‘Scarborough Spa Express’.
“All credit to BR Eastern Region at the time because it was quite a gamble for them. Initially, they were just a morning and afternoon circle via Harrogate.
“And then we got into doing more or less 200-mile days; morning and evening circle and a trip out to Scarborough and back.
“However, it got to the point where the evening circles were a disappointment in terms of passenger numbers. All of us who took part thought, if the numbers were crap, would BR do them next year?
“We started doing a collection after the evening circle and a number of us began to fire the crews up.
“It started off where you used to get quite nippy performances and the collection was quite sizeable. The better the performances got, the higher the collection. At the end of the night, we were handing over quite a parcel of money to the driver, fireman and inspector. That, in turn, started to get a bit of rivalry going between the drivers, so you can imagine what started to happen.
“So people started posing questions. ‘What’s the best time you can do York-Leeds? What speed are you going to be doing at the top of the bank at Horsforth, then from Harrogate back to York?’
“The fun we had doing that. The firemen used to ask whether we wanted to do the firing – that’s when it really started to be fun. The inspectors joined in with it, but kept things near to what they should be.
“The passenger numbers just went up and up and up. The evening circles started to be really good.
“The elusive record was the 26-mile leg between York and Leeds in 30 minutes.”
On August Bank Holiday Sunday 1984, No. 5305 snatched it.
“We ran into Platform 8 at York, having had a cracking run from Scarborough. At the end of Platform 8 was the relief driver Bernard Wilkinson, formerly of Aberdeen shed. Bernard was quite portly, and he wore a flat cap, shirt and tie, bleached blue overalls, and polished shoes. He was classed as one of York’s good blokes, of which there were quite a lot. But he was one who stood out.
“The timers were there again. ‘Are we going to have 30 minutes to Leeds then Bernard?’ He just looked and said, ‘we’ll see what we can do’.
“He climbed into the cab and said to the fireman: ‘you just sit there, Tom can drop the water valve and you can put the injector on, and I’ll drive and fire it.” I thought, oh God. And the inspector just smiled.
“We got the ‘right away’. And he went for it.
“He drove and fired all the way to Leeds. Just before Church Fenton, we had a maximum of 77mph and we were doing 60 at the top of Micklefield.
“Normally they shut off once they got over the junction. Not that night. He kept it going.
“We flew through Crossgates. Ahead was Neville Hill Junction which, even at 60mph, would throw you all over the place.
“We were still flying past Neville Hill shed and the curve coming onto Neville Hill West is really canted over. We hit the junction, still with the regulator open, and there’s a sharp curve at the end of Marsh Lane Cutting and I’m thinking ‘effing hell’.
“The inspector said, “don’t you think you should put the brake in now Bernard?” to which his response was ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’.
“It was a big dollop of brake as we swung round the corner and we got greens all the way into the station.
“The timers couldn’t believe it – 27 minutes, 6 seconds. It flew. To my knowledge, it’s never been beaten.”
‘Expect the unexpected’ started to become a recurring theme and so it was again on June 2 1984, when the ‘King Arthur’ (two years on from its return to steam in Hull), was due to haul a train for John Beck’s Grampian Railtours, from York, going round the circle going anticlockwise via Harrogate. Sir Lamiel would uncouple at Leeds and toddle off back to Hull.
“As we were sat coupled to the train, it came over the tannoy that the ‘all stations’ to Harrogate and Leeds was cancelled due to a mechanical problem. Various BR people were rushing about on the platform, wondering what the hell to do with all these passengers.
“The next thing, our driver came back to me and asked if I had any objection to our train becoming the all stops to Leeds. I said, ‘are you for real?’
“John Beck had no problem and there was plenty of room. All these people got on and we were right away all stops to Leeds. It was unreal. Big licks out of each station with a nine-coach train. It was superb.
“I think we lost about 5-6 minutes on what the running time would have been, but considering you were hauling a train consisting of that weight, all stops, which was quite a lot, slowing down for single line tokens, it was quite exciting.
“Jobs like that don’t happen very often and it came totally out of the blue.”
DANTE’S INFERNO
“We started using two engines to keep the interest up. One engine would do the morning and evening circle and the other would do the run to Scarborough.
“On one of the evening circles with ‘Lamiel’, the crew turned up and the driver was Jack Butterworth, who wore an oversized BR smock. His fireman was Walter Wilkinson, who was good on the shovel, but there was no communication between the two of them, which I thought was a bit odd.
“I said to Sid Brookes, the inspector, ‘they’re not very chatty’. He said: ‘Oh, don’t go there. Walter worked in one of the strikes and is classed as a scab by Mr Butterworth.’ Again, I thought ‘oh my God’.
“I got on the engine and we backed off Queen Street. Walter asked me if I’d like to fire it to Leeds. ‘Don’t mind if I do’.
“I built the fire up and off we went. And I’d said to the driver, ‘when you get to Church Fenton, you’ll let it out up the bank, won’t you?’
“‘I’ll let it out alright’, and he never said any more.
“By Ulleskelf, I was looking at the gauge, which was on about 160, which wasn’t a good place to be, but I daren’t put any more on.
“We were bearing down on Church Fenton and it’s still on 160 and I thought ‘this is going to be a crap climb of the bank’. I put a bit more coal on the back end and just as we were entering the station, all hell broke loose at the front end. I thought, what the heck’s going off?
“I looked over and the number on the reverser was nearer 75 than it was to 40. I was watching the fire and thinking, where’s it going?
“Amazingly, the pressure gauge went ping and it was blowing its cods off. I was firing all the way up to Micklefield and looking at the fire, it was dancing off the bars. It was just like Maltesers jumping up and down in the box. And the needle just stayed hard over and I had the exhaust steam injector on, which held the water at about two thirds of a glass.
“So long as I could keep a back end in, which is what I did, it was just pulling it down to the front. It was like Dante’s Inferno and it steamed like merry hell.
“All the while, Jack said bu**er all and Walter just sat there. It was absolutely unbelievable.
“I remember thinking, what an engine this is. One hell of an engine. After that episode, I think a lot of us really started to appreciate its potential.
It was like Dante’s Inferno and it steamed like merry hell TOM TIGHE
“And what happened that particular night got back to the rest of the York crews and they were aware of what its capabilities were, because there was always a niggle about what it could do when it went somewhere that an ‘Arthur’ hadn’t been before.
“One of the inspectors that we had at Hull was a chap called John Slean, who came from the north east. He remembered the ‘King Arthurs’ that went to Heaton in the war and he actually fired them. When we were doing ‘Lamiel’ up, he said ‘I hope it’s as good as the ones we had on loan from the Southern’.
“When it came to training the Hull lads, he was the ideal bloke. he took all of the Botanic Gardens crews on the engine and took them through it.
“He spoke of ‘Lamiel’ in glowing terms to the other inspectors, plus what they’d seen that night going up to Leeds and the York crews meant that they saw it in a totally different light.”
But some remained sceptical.
“You had people who thought they knew what its capabilities were, but didn’t. Experts about everything, but who actually knew naff all.
“A lot of that came from certain people at Carnforth at the time, and in turn they talked to some of the London Midland inspectors who thought it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.
“It proved them wrong on numerous occasions.” One of its doubters was BR InterCity Special Trains Manager David Ward, who decreed that its first railtour on March 27 1982, over the Settle-Carlisle, must be double-headed.
“To be fair to David, in most cases when we had a chat about ‘Lamiel’, he was only relaying back what people had told him. He was playing safe from the BR side of things.
“When we crossed swords about ‘Lamiel’, I used to say to him that you only had to look in the books and see what they were doing in the 1920s: 550-ton trains to Exeter, day in, day out. ‘Well that was then’, he’d say.
“We had one or two hot phone calls, but at the end of it, he had a job to do and I was trying to get work for the engine. I used to be a bit fiery in those days.
“Eventually, he saw what it was capable of and there was nobody more surprised than me to get a phone call at work from David, asking if we could take it to Marylebone to stand in for Clan Line.
“It was hauling 11-coach trains and the Marylebone crews, people like Brian Axtell and Gordon Reid, thought it was marvellous. What it did there opened a lot of people’s eyes.
“David was a good ally to us in the end.”