TAKE ‘FIVE’
Leaving Hull was a painful experience for Tom Tighe and his band of ‘Black Five’ and ‘King Arthur’ volunteers, but a chance move to the Great Central opened up a world of possibilities. NICK BRODRICK concludes his series of interviews with the man who has
Air raid sirens wailed across Hull.
The Luftwaffe was on its way.
Hull Dairycoates shed night watchman Jim Gavin made a beeline for the coaling tower. There was series of huts beneath and he found shelter in one of them, together with a gang of men who’d had the same idea.
Amid the siren sound, they heard footsteps approach the small hut in which they were hiding. The door handle shook, but it didn’t open. They shouted, ‘if you’re coming in, come on”.
But nothing.
They went to the door and opened it, but as far as they could see, all around the coaling tower, there was nobody. They didn’t even hear footsteps walking away. So they made a run for it down the yard. It had spooked them.
Moments later, a German bomb landed and exploded next to where they had been hiding. If they had still been in that building, they’d have been killed.
The ghost stories that Jim would tell Hull Locomotive Preservation Group chairman Tom Tighe 25 years later spooked him as well.
“I’d come back from the pub and go in to have a chat with Jim. He would start with his tales of the rails, some of which would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
“By the time he’d finished, you’d be thinking, ‘I’ve got to walk down that wide open yard past where the coaling tower used to be to get back to the support coach. It’s dark and I’m on my own’. It was really creepy.
“After one or two of his tales, I stopped going down to the coach; you’d imagine all sorts. Instead, I’d stop over in the old ambulance room, where there was a bed, and sleep in that, because I was frightened to death of walking down the yard.
“It was an eerie place, even in daylight.”
SHORT-LIVED EXPANSION
But haunted or not, Dairycoates was the perfect home for the Humberside Locomotive Preservation Group which, as we found in SR500, had established itself on the outskirts of Hull in 1969 and restored both its flagship ‘Black Five’ No. 5305 and National Collection ‘King Arthur’ No. 777 Sir Lamiel.
“When Dairycoates closed as a wagon repair depot in 1984, we thought about what we might do,” Tom recalls. “There was a big workshop, an elevated wheeldrop and a two-road running shed, which was part of one of the roundhouses in steam days, but which had been later converted into a two-road diesel shed before later being used for wagon repairs.”
Tom didn’t need a second invitation to upgrade from the cramped single-road crane shed that HLPG had occupied for 25 years.
“We took over the two-road straight shed in the October. The first engines in were the ‘Five’ and the NRM’s ‘V2’. We’d dragged it back from York with the ‘Five’ the same year, and we were to re-tube and re-register it for the main line.”
Soon enough, the three-cylinder 2-6-2 was overhauled and returned to York. “We’d done the work on the ‘V2’ as a favour to the museum and to keep the lads busy while there weren’t any other projects on the go.
“The ‘J52’ [No. 1247] was another one where the museum asked us if we’d like to take it on. It was a bit worn, in more ways than one. Not least the water tanks, which were very thin. It was a pain to repair them, but we got there in the end.
“We took it out of the shed ready for a run up the yard. I asked my mate whether he’d tried the brake; ‘yeah, yeah, it’s fine’ was his response.
“I got on and took it up the yard. I went to put the brake in – and nowt happened. I ended up having to ‘pole’ the thing to a stop [using the reverser] and it was downhill going back into the shed, so it was a bit exciting judging where to stop it in the shed without hitting anything.
“It turned out that the rolling rings in the brake cylinder were shot; something we were able to sort out with not much bother.”
More space and better facilities meant that HLPG’s new abode quickly paid dividends.
“We’d used the wheeldrop to drop the back wheels out of ‘Lamiel’ because it had frame cracks in the right-hand side. The only way we could do it properly was to cut the offending area out and put a new piece in.
“The deal was that BR would let us use the wheeldrop provided we engaged BR’s welder on site to do the repair and pay for his services. He was authorised to work the wheeldrop as well, but we got free use of the building while we were in there.
“The wheeldrop was of pure North Eastern Railway, 1912 vintage, which could take driving wheels up to 7ft diameter. It was powered by a little electric motor, which drove a water hydraulic pump. We used it quite a lot while we were there and the building was a lovely place to work.”
HULL SCUPPERED
But in 1992, everything changed.
“The BR Property Board came to see us, and they said, ‘look, we’re going to sell the site, but we want to try and look after your needs. You tell us what bits you want and we’ll see if we can sort something out’.
“What we came up with was the two-road shed and the wheeldrop, the crane shed and the track at the west end of the yard. At the east end of the yard, they could do what they wanted.
“The gentleman said, at present day figures, you’re probably talking £90,000. We thought that was okay, and that’s when we started talking to Draper’s [the local scrap merchant who saved and owned No. 5305] with a view to the company buying some of the land with us.
“What put the spanner in the works was the council announcing a new bypass road, Clive Sullivan Way, which was going to go right next to the depot. That pushed the property prices sky high. It scuppered the whole project.
“Inevitably, I had a visit from a property developer. He didn’t want us causing a stink over the possibility of him acquiring the site, so he was full of promises; ‘I’ll look after you lads’ and all the rest of it, me knowing full well what he was really thinking.
“In the office, we had this big desk. We had revarnished it a couple of days previous to him coming in. Eventually, as the conversation came to a close, he got up and under his arms on his flash suit was sticky varnish. I thought ‘oh dear’.” But having already got his response in first, Tom admits: “I never said anything. I simply thought to myself ‘just get out of the office!’
“The auction was held in Hull in 1993. We went along and Chris Draper came with us. Draper’s had dabbled in small property acquisitions as a sideline to the main scrap business. Chris wanted to try and do something, but the bidding went silly. The whole site went for £450,000 and the property developer bought the site.
“We’d still got about 18 months to run on our agreement, which was now with the developer, which he had to honour. But I remember Chris saying to me at the end of the auction, ‘I’d start looking for somewhere else. Once your tenancy agreement runs out, he will jack the price up for the rent’.
“And that’s exactly what he did. All he could see was pound signs.
“Eventually, we had to come out of the two-road shed,
I got on and took it up the yard. I went to put the brake in and nowt happened
the workshop and the wheeldrop shed and we ended up back in the crane shed. We were paying £7,000 a year just to use the crane shed. It was unsustainable, which was why we had to move in 1994.
“Nevertheless, we made sure that the wheeldrop and all the machine tools in the workshop were all handed over to us. The wheeldrop is now at the North Yorkshire Moors because we had nowhere to put it, so it’s nice to think that it’s still in an appropriate place.”
BINBROOK BAIL OUT
The ‘Arthur’ was out on the main line at that point, so it wasn’t an urgent problem, but the ‘Five’ was at the Keighley & Worth Valley and the ticket had expired.
“We were looking at keeping it there, but they didn’t have space available. We even looked at the possibility of putting up a shed at Ingrow on the ‘Great Northern side’, the other side to where Bahamas established a base, but there were too many hurdles to overcome.
“We had nowhere to go. We looked everywhere. “We ideally wanted to stay in the Hull area and we looked at all sorts of buildings, but concluded we’d have to look further afield. The further away we got from our core base of supporters, you knew fewer of them would travel to wherever you’d make home.
“Eventually we ended up at Binbrook, Lincolnshire, an old RAF base, home to the last squadron of Lightning aircraft. It was the nearest we could find, with a building big enough to do what we wanted. The workshop had big blast doors on one end and roller doors on the other.
“The building we ended up putting the ‘Five’ in for its third overhaul involved driving up a ramp to access it and we had to put it in at an angle and two lengths of rail to stand it on.
“It wasn’t long before we realised that we needed to get it out of there, because we were losing people who’d supported us in Hull. They came to Binbrook a few times but complained at how long it’d take to get there. It was clearly a temporary solution.”
Tom had left his employment at Doncaster in 1986 to become a self-employed locomotive engineer, but a conversation with Great Central Railway chief mechanical engineer Barry Gambles led to the offer of full-time employment as a fitter at Loughborough.
“I started work at the GCR in January 1996 and they said ‘why don’t you bring the ‘Five’ here?’ and that’s when we bailed out of Binbrook.
“Even though we knew we’d lose even more people from Hull, we had the manpower at Loughborough to compensate. Membership actually went up.”
BLOODY PHENOMENAL ‘O4’
The comings and goings continued as Barry Gambles left the GCR just four months later and Chief Executive Graham Oliver swiftly appointed Tom as the new CME.
“Craig Stinchcombe, who had served his apprenticeship here, was appointed deputy and we formed a good team.”
1996 had already been a hectic year – and it was to become ever more so with the June arrival of the NRM’s Robinson ‘O4’ 2-8-0 No. 63601 for restoration in conjunction with Steam Railway and its readers.
For Tom, it immediately reawakened his childhood. “The memories sat at Thorne Junction, watching them start off, hauling a heavy coal or iron ore train was bloody phenomenal. The sound of the ‘O4s’ pounding up to Thorne South was unbelievable: 50 years old, just plodding along, with more modern engines falling by the wayside.
“So to be involved with that all those years later was brilliant. The board made the decision to allow Craig to lead the restoration. Graham could see that someone who had not long come out of his time as an apprentice and who was a modern-day steam engineer, at 20-odd years old, taking on a project to rebuild an historic engine that was built in 1912, would bring the railway some really good publicity and show what could be done in the late 1990s. I certainly thought it was a brilliant way to go and he proved it.
“We had a good team... on Saturdays and Sundays, I’d bet you that we had ten or 12 people all working on it. One of the shed volunteers, Alex Pakes, would come in on a Sunday and do a full roast dinner for everyone, that’s how good it was to be involved at that time.
“It’s always been referred to as Craig’s baby. He’s got a lot of affection for that engine, because it was his first
We had problems with water quality, which caused no end of problems with locomotive availability because of leaking tubes and stays
big project and it gave this railway 12 years of service, including a two-year extension to its boiler certificate.
“The last day that we ran it, we fetched it back on shed and you’d have thought ‘why can’t it keep on running?’ To the untrained eye, you wouldn’t have even thought it was in steam. It just sat there with 100-odd pounds in the boiler, quiet as a mouse and you just thought ‘wow’.”
A NEW DAWN
The successful maintenance and operation that allowed No. 63601 to continue into its centenary was far from guaranteed when it first returned to steam in 2000.
“The first few years were difficult. At the time, the railway was not overflowing with cash, so it couldn’t invest in the infrastructure and we had problems with water quality, which caused no end of problems with locomotive availability because of leaking tubes and stays, and it was a constant battle to keep them running.
“We persevered, but the way forward was a reverse osmosis plant. We eventually got that installed and it
transformed the availability. We’ve gone from strength to strength, which is testament to the quality that the lads strive for when you look at how many locomotives we’ve now got available. We’re hiring out locomotives regularly, which we were never able to do.
“I think back to how much time and effort was wasted each week, having to go into a locomotive firebox to caulk stays up, seams, expand tubes. The reverse osmosis plant made all that a thing of the past. It was like a new dawn.
“There’s a great team of blokes here and what we’ve done here over the years has been for the good of the railway and the engines have certainly benefitted from the systems we’ve put in place.”
And the highs kept on coming. The ‘Black Five’ returned in 2003, resplendent in British Railways livery for the first time since August 1968, while Sir Lamiel followed in similar fashion by making its preservation era debut in Fifties-Sixties green.
Both 4-6-0s returned to the main line and continued to put in reliable performances, notably a more-thanbrisk run with No. 45305 to the 2005 Crewe Works Open Weekend, while the ‘King Arthur’ showed its strength by famously restarting its 12-coach train in appalling damp conditions, having stalled on Honiton Bank during leaf fall season in 2007.
‘CROMWELL’ CLIMAX
The icing on the cake was an approach in 2003 by Emap Transport Division manager Nigel Harris and SR Editor Tony Streeter with an offer that Tom simply couldn’t refuse. They had struck an unlikely deal to release Oliver Cromwell from Bressingham, where the National Collection ‘Britannia’ had resided since 1968, and they wanted Tom, 5305LA, the GCR and partners to overhaul and run it for the 40th anniversary of its ‘1T57’ exploits.
“When I found out what they were up to, I thought ‘effing hell, but why not?’.
As things transpired, Tom managed the project until January 2008, when then GCR managing director Bill Ford asked him to become the head of the Carriage & Wagon department, while Craig was promoted to CME and saw No. 70013 through to completion that May.
Even so, it was under Tom’s 5305LA watch that ‘Cromwell’ ventured back out onto the network.
“We enjoyed taking ‘Cromwell’ to different parts of the country over the last ten years so that people could enjoy it. Because of what ‘Cromwell’ is, it was always at the back of my mind that it should be seen by as many people as possible.
“When we were going to Scotland, Kent, East Anglia, the South West, all over the place, that was great.
“Every time it went to Norfolk, we always had a feeling of it going home. People in Norwich had a lot of affection for it. They used to say, ‘you’ve brought our engine home’. You’d look at them and many of them weren’t even around when these were running. That’s the effect it had.
“It’s special to a lot of people and it was good to see people coming out and appreciating it.
“I don’t think I ever heard anyone say, ‘oh, bloody hell, it’s that ‘Cromwell’ again’…
“It’s like when we were running ‘Lamiel’ on the ‘Weymouths’ back into Waterloo. I’d make sure the engine was OK, and then I’d just stand there and watch people’s reactions. Not the people who’d just walked off the train it had just brought in, but those who’d walked through the barrier to catch their train to Surbiton and being stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of this amazing piece of kit at the bufferstops.
“A lot of them were young people, some of whom had probably never seen a steam loco, but they were interested to the point that they wanted to know how they could find out more about it. So it’s got to be good. That’s what used to make it for me: the engines being out there, doing what they were built for, doing the biz time and again and being enjoyed by thousands of people. That’s the payback.
“I’m not here for people to shower me with praise. I’m here because I enjoy it and to keep the engines running.”
That may be, but it didn’t stop him from being awarded The Heritage Railway Association, Railway Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
NO MORE FLAK
And yet it wasn’t long before the tectonic plates of preservation started to move again beneath Tom’s feet.
2019 brought about the biggest seismic shift for the association since its relocation to the GCR. The NRM decided to transfer custodianship of No. 70013 to the GCR itself on expiry of its boiler certificate, while simultaneously deciding not to renew that of Sir Lamiel after more than 40 years in Tom’s and his team’s care (having last steamed in 2016). Tom subsequently stood down as chairman of 5305LA (replaced by Alan Berck-May) but remains as its volunteer engineer.
As part of the shake-up, Tom returned to the GCR
motive power department as special projects manager for the current overhauls of Oliver Cromwell and the ‘O4’.
“Being directly responsible for ‘Cromwell’ since 2004, looking back, probably wasn’t the happiest of associations, because the older I got, the less hassle I wanted and there was certainly a fair amount that went with that engine.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some happy memories with it, but equally some I’d rather forget.
“If it wasn’t doing what certain people wanted,
I was at the receiving end of all the flak. Towards the end of its ticket, I was getting to the point of thinking, ‘do I really need this?’
“How things have turned out is probably the best I could have hoped for, by still having some input to its wellbeing, with the same team, and somebody else holding the custodianship. They then have to look after the aggro side, for want of a better word, and I can just get on with doing what they want doing with the engine once its restored.
“For me, it’s one less thing to be continuously worrying about and I think it will be a good partnership with the railway.
“Everybody benefits and gets what they want out of it. The railway gets to use it here more regularly, the NRM gets to see it out on the network to fulfil its ambitions and we, as a supporting group, get to enjoy that side of the operation and still be a part of it.
“We all work as a team, irrespective of whether it’s one of the railway’s projects, or you’re a member of 5305LA or LSLG [Loughborough Standard Locomotive Group], we just get on with it.
“To come in here and be able to work on an engine and get younger people involved who’ve never done it before is a good feeling, because you know you’re prolonging how many years that engine could potentially run, by knowing full well that you’ve got people learning the job who can carry on when you’ve gone.
“But I also acknowledge that I’m in the twilight of my working career and I’d like to think that I can go on probably another three to five years, and then I think I’ll be about knackered. I’ve got to accept that I’ve got an active mind, but the body is saying ‘I don’t think so’,” he reflects, 50 years after first working on No. 5305.
50-YEAR LOVE AFFAIR
“I’d certainly like to get another overhaul done on the ‘Five’,” he plans for the engine whose boiler certificate expires in August, “and hopefully take it back to Hull for the first time since the Eighties. That, and finish the ‘O4’ and ‘Brit’, which will take me to 72.
“Then I think I’ll hang up my spanners and it’ll be the turn of one of the younger lads to take it on. I’ll carry on in a supporting role as long as I can. Probably until I keel over. I’m not one for sitting around watching daytime TV; there are only so many episodes of Homes Under the Hammer you can watch.”
As long as there are steam locomotives in Tom’s life then there’s little chance of that happening – and one locomotive in particular.
“The ‘Five’, I’ll never lose any affection for that beast. I don’t know why. It’s 100-odd tons of steel, but there’s something about it – and that’s what keeps me going.
“When I’m on it, around it, I just feel comfortable. I can’t put my finger on why, but that’s how it is. To see it working is the icing on the cake.
“The Draper family have been brilliant throughout. Peter, Chris before him, young Albert and Albert senior have been brilliant.
“I was with Peter recently and he said ‘I can’t thank you and the lads enough’. If he’s happy, I’m happy.
“We’re always conscious of the fact that it is their locomotive; not 5305LA’s. It is the property of the family and we operate it on their behalf, and they have put their trust in us to look after it and show it off to the public.
“Working on it gives me an awful lot of satisfaction. I think I’ve got the best of everything. People say, ‘you’re married to that engine’. Well, I probably am.”