main line miscellanea

●● Steam Dreams has announced some ‘Scotsman’ tours for 2020. Some of them are maybe not so much to shout about from the purely gricer point of view (in fact, Paddington to Oxford or Victoria to Salisbury are a case in point for the authenticity arguments made earlier…). But one of them certainly is, and that’s the reiteration of another multi-day trip with Edinburgh as its destination (July 2-5). It’s not all with the ‘A3’: modern traction takes the train from King’s Cross to York on day one (followed by No. 60103 to ‘Auld Reekie’) and from Preston back to London at the end. That follows a spin south by ‘Scotsman’ from Edinburgh via the Settle-Carlisle.

●● Given we’ve made a bit of a theme of the Cumbrian Coast in recent weeks, it seems only fair to mention another Railway Touring Company trip over the line, this one being on March 14 (a Euston start with an electric, before steam goes on in the north). Another is planned for September 26.

Separately, Tornado is running over the route on May 2 (SR499).

●● Clun Castle in daily service! OK, I’m joshing with you… for today’s GWR is naming the power cars for its refurbished ‘short’ High Speed Train sets after ‘Castles’, and No. 43153 has become ‘Clun’. Might the two locomotives one day meet…?

●● If it’s Steam Railway’s 40th anniversary, it must also be 20 years since the first train of what became Steam Dreams… and the promoter is marking that on December 17. That’s one day before the exact anniversary of Marcus Robertson’s Waterloo-Salisbury trip in 1999 with ‘5MT’ No. 73096, and appropriately ‘B1’ No. 61306 is to do almost the same thing – albeit this time extended to Sherborne. Passengers are to receive a souvenir, and I’m told there may be some interesting characters from those early days going along…

●● Sad tidings reach Down Main that former Marylebone (and before that Neasden GC) steam man Gordon Reid has died. A regular driver on the Marylebone-Stratford trips of the 1980s, he was also aboard King Edward I when it infamously hit a bridge outside Paddington in 1992, knocking off its safety valve.

Gordon, who retired way back in 2001, was 83. He had been ill for some time.