Yours for £350,000, a life-size train set ( very big garden required)
TRAIN enthusiasts are renowned for being rather dedicated to their somewhat niche pastime.
But the ambitions of even the most passionate devotees might hit the buffers at the prospect of building a working steam railway in their garden.
Not the late Adrian Shooter CBE, however, who loved trains so much he constructed a mile-long, figure-of-eight track in the grounds of his north Oxfordshire home.
And now his locomotive – said to be the world’s oldest working steam train – is being sold for £200,000 as part of the transport boss’s amazing garden railway.
He acquired his one- of-a-kind engine, used on the famous Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in India in the late 19th century, to run on his narrow-gauge line. Built in 1889, the 19B Darjeeling B Class locomotive is the only one to have ever left India – and it is leading the sale of a 200-lot collection of railway pieces amassed by Mr Shooter. The whole collection, which also includes a 1930 electric London Post Office Railway Car, is expected to fetch £350,000. Mr Shooter, pictured, joined British Rail as a management trainee in 1970 and went on to become the head of the privatised Chiltern Railways. A statue of him is displayed at Marylebone station in London. He built the Beeches Light Railway at his home in Steeple Aston, near Bicester, in his spare time and ran it with volunteers. Mr Shooter also acquired other locomotives and had replica carriages made to carry passengers.
He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in February 2022 and died at 74 in December. It was his dying wish that the railway be ripped up and sold with the rolling stock. Mr Shooter’s widow Barbara is handling the sale, along with HJ Pugh Auctioneers of Ledbury, Herefordshire. Speaking of Mr Shooter’s passion for trains, Henry Biss, of HJ Pugh, said: ‘It’s all going under the hammer on June 21 and the star of the show is the 19B Darjeeling locomotive which is the oldest boiler steam train in the world.’