A tribute to Quainton Road founder Roy Miller 1931-2022
ROY Miller has gone, in his own words,“to that great engine shed in the sky”.
He was a man of many parts but all were connected to and by railway preservation, going back to the London Railway Preservation Society (LRPS), formed in 1962. They remitted Roy and his lifelong friend and fellow preservationist Peter Clarke to look for a railway site to set up a preservation centre with a decent length of running line.
These two, who also formed The Ivatt Trust, looked at sites including Buntingford and associated branch lines which closed in 1965. They decided that Quainton Road on the Metropolitan & GC Joint line – which had just lost its passenger traffic at around the same time, with the line closing at Calvert four miles further north – was the place to set up a heritage railway centre. It was also hoped that the new Quainton Railway Society would be allowed by BR to operate steam services seven miles to Aylesbury along the freight line.
Roy told the author that after long and tedious negotiations in the 1980s, BR agreed – so long as the locomotive was crewed by BR once the boiler pressure hit 100psi. He thought this ridiculous, given it was a single line with a maximum permitted speed of 30mph, so the plan was shelved.
However, he did get his wish of main line steam driving when, as a founder member of the Steam on the Met organising committee, helping to organise the first event in 1989 celebrating the Chesham branch centenary, he drove Quainton’s Metropolitan Railway E class 0-4-4T No. 1, with the London Transport electric locomotive No.12 Sarah Siddons also used. That, and the following Steam on the Met/ Underground events over the next few decades are a fitting legacy to Roy, who remained on the organising team throughout.
The Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, where the author first met Roy in the 1980s, is perhaps his largest legacy. Among his many roles was being one of the first ‘authorised’ Fat Controllers at ‘Thomas’ events, and he was the secretary when the centre opened in 1969.
This location was selected as it was not far from Chesham, where Roy lived and went to school on Ivatt tank-hauled services, and it provided enough space for the LRPS collection. It had a goods yard and was adjacent to a former Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries ‘buffer depot’ with five Nissan Huts and a sizeable brick-built store. This was looked on as a future asset, offering covered accommodation for LRPS artefacts.
Roy’s skills at the fore
Once it had fallen out of use, Roy drew up plans to convert units to rail use and, with the help of a £50,000 Heritage Lottery Grant, turned them into a museum. Using electrical engineering skills gained with British Thompson Houston and construction skills learned with Cementation (which built the Kariba Dam in Africa), he made conversion plans with deep foundations, laying railway tracks into the depot’s main building.
This was only made possible after another huge achievement by Roy; he paved the way for the BRC to become an accredited museum, opening up further funding and displaying material from the NRM.
His skills again came into play when LNWR Rewley Road station from Oxford was relocated to Quainton Road in 1999/2000 and Roy designed the traverser, which is used to change exhibits housed in that station.
The Ivatt Trust was formed with the aim to buy one of the Ivatt locomotives Roy and Peter travelled to and from school behind on the Chesham branch. BR suggested that there were better ones at Nine Elms and they duly purchased 2-6-2T No. 41298. They also purchased sister engine No. 41313 and the tender version No. 46447 from Barry as a spares source.
These three locomotives remained under cover at Quainton for decades with little apparent restoration progress, with the Ivatt Trust’s annual general meeting quietly taking place on one of the footplates accompanied by tea and cake. Roy claimed that the floorboards on No. 41298 were made of re-used packing crates borrowed from his workplace!
Many offers of help to overhaul these engines in financial and physical terms were made but always politely declined. The Ivatt Trust decided to gift the locomotives, including former Stewarts & Lloyds ironstone quarries Hunslet Austerity 0-6-0ST No. 3850 of 1958 Juno, to the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. The handover ceremony was held on June 6, 2009, to which the author was invited.
The pair were presented with a painting of their Ivatts in steam at Havenstreet, something many who knew them quietly thought they would never see.
However, they did so on an emotional day in May 2018 thanks to the IOWSR engineering team, making it possible with Roy’s name is inscribed in the cab of No. 41313.
Over lunch at Havenstreet that day, Roy and Peter explained that BR had planned to replace the LSWR O2 0-4-4Ts with Ivatt tanks before this was superseded by electrifying the line in 1967. So, perhaps the Ivatt Trust, in conjunction with the IoWSR have created history that never happened! Another first for preservation? And not content with gifting the locomotives to Havenstreet, Roy also designed their wheeldrop.
Roy Bruce Miller, it was an honour to know you. There aren’t many preservationists who will leave, or have left, such an amazing railway legacy. And genuinely I never heard a cross word from him!
➜ Roy passed away on April 5.