First or last - which is best?
It’s sometimes difficult to work out what makes a Steam Railway reader move from the armchair and onto a station platform. Is it the final run before an engine is withdrawn or a route is shut forever, or is it the first ride behind a freshly restored locomotive over the main line, or a freshly reopened stretch of relaid track on a preserved line? Taking these one at a time, there is real excitement in the air on the 50th anniversary of the closure of the Somerset & Dorset system. Even though a diminishing number of people have any personal memories of Derby-built ‘7F’ 2-8-0s pounding the Mendips in the early 1960s, there remains sustained interest in the Bath-Bournemouth route and the kite-flying prospect of its eventual reinstatement (given a couple of hundred million, serious progress could be made in this regard). No apologies, therefore, for devoting a dozen pages to the S&D in this issue, and even though the largest ‘50th’ commemoration is taking place miles away at the West Somerset Railway, it still counts. The S&D Heritage Trust at Midsomer Norton - and Gartell Light Railway at Templecombe - will also be running trains over short sections of trackbed that was traversed by double-headed Bulleid ‘Pacifics’ precisely half a decade earlier. For other readers, it’s only real main line steam that matters, and I admit to some surprise that the ‘£450 Special’ - the run of ‘A3’ No. 60103 Flying Scotsman out of King’s Cross on February 25 - registered almost zero on the Richter scale among them. Those who also go to first night concerts or major music festivals probably accept that ‘high hype’ events like this are expensive, as opposed to those who get their fix later on when the price matches their means. However, it sticks in the craw for those of us who felt excluded from BR’s (half empty) End of Steam ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’ on August 15 1968, because the ‘1T57’ fare was more than half a week’s wage (including overtime). In 2016, a ‘Scotsman’ £450 ticket was even further out of reach because it was almost a week’s money for a UK working man, and three times the weekly old age pension. Still, SR readers can treasure the memories of (cheap) journeys behind our beloved No. 60103 before it became a mega-icon (ouch), and watch it on DVD instead - in the comfort of a favourite armchair. I’m pleased to tell you that Steam Railway’s total average sales figure for 2015 was 29,920, which is our annual ABC newsstand figure plus some additional digital copies. Because we are uniquely and proudly 100% steam, please don’t compare our figures directly with other publications - in one of them the steam content has recently dropped to less than a third of its pages. And sorry - we haven’t got any news about High Speed 2.