TRIBUTE WELL DESERVED

Thank you for writing the well-deserved tribute to John Cameron. It illustrates how much professional railwaymen, steam locomotive enthusiasts, media and the general public owe to benefactors like him.

To run a ‘Pacific’ for over 50 years after it was withdrawn as obsolete is no mean feat, particularly as safety standards are progressively tightened.

On the basis of an overhaul being mandatory every ten years, John has had to invest circa £4 million in keeping the ‘A4’ operational while recovering less than a quarter of this in hire fees.

In addition, there is the considerable responsibility on the locomotive owner to provide a safe and reliable engine and the risk to his personal reputation if it causes delay to other trains or a mishap. I can remember a number of incidents with ‘Number Nine’ when awkward questions were asked after a serious incident.

I also have a memory from around 1970, when I was accompanying the BR senior engineer who had ultimate responsibility for signing off the locomotive as safe and reliable to an inspector at York. ‘Number Nine’ was in a very run-down condition and he had to tell John that the locomotive needed a very heavy overhaul before it could run again on the main line.

Most men faced with the cost and workload would have called it a day. Not so John, and this is the measure of the personal burden he has borne over these 54 years.

This needs to be recognised with a very big thank you, not just to John but also to all the other benefactors who have kept steam locomotives alive over this period. I have known most of them. They are usually modest, but this should not be a reason for taking their munificence for granted.

●● L&Y 2-4-2T No. 1008 was also mentioned in a recent issue, and it’s another example of the uninterest at the time of its early preservation.

When the LMR chief boiler inspector George Knight and LMR mechanical inspector Alan Wilson went to inspect it with a view to putting it back in working order, in a similar way to Hardwicke, they removed a washout plug and water the colour of black ink flowed out.

The boiler had clearly not been emptied after it was last steamed at Horwich (irregularly?). The washout plug was replaced and the view taken that corrosion would have taken place to the extent that a restoration to steaming condition would be very expensive.

David Ward, former director, BR Special Trains, Cambridge