LIFE BEGINS AT 40É
Forty years. Forty great achievements. It’s quite a record. There are many, many others that space, and our limit of a top 40, prevent us from highlighting. Suffice to say, they have all played their part in making up the railway preservation world that we enjoy so much today.
What of the next 40 years? What are the top 40 greatest achievements yet to come?
Looking at some of the enormous challenges that our movement now faces, you’d be forgiven for thinking there won’t be that many more. The impending coal crisis, a crackdown in environmental legislation, over-proliferation with far too many locomotives, railways and restoration schemes, increasing shortages of the volunteers and engineering skills needed to complete them, a loss of interest as the generation that remembers ‘real’ steam gradually heads for the great engine shed in the sky; to see all this, you might wonder whether steam preservation has had its day, and the future does not hold forty more great achievements before 2059. Certainly it is a sobering thought that in that year, we’ll be looking forward to hopefully celebrating, in some way, the centenary of Evening Star in 2060…
However, preservation’s greatest achievement of all is not an individual feat, but its collective effort. It’s the fact that, despite the loss of some railways and steam centres, the movement is still here and, by and large, still thriving nearly 70 years after ambitious but amateur enthusiasts took over the Talyllyn Railway, little realising what they had set in motion.
Now that movement is arguably facing 40 difficult years ahead – perhaps the most challenging it has ever faced – but it is innovative, and it is tenacious.
Any realist must conclude that, 40 years hence, it will be a very different preservation world to that of today, just as today is to 1979 – but in those past four decades, we have grown, matured and adapted to changing circumstances, and there is reason to hope that there will be steam railways, and Steam Railway, still around to enjoy in some form.