‘Dub Dees’ return home
To think of ‘Dub Dees’ on Southern turf usually conjures up images of the blue, red and white-liveried engines that paraded on the Longmoor Military Railway in Hampshire. But while there was only ever one 2-8-0 (together with a pair of ‘ten-coupleds’) based at Liss, 50 of the rugged War Department engines were allocated across half a dozen Southern Railway sheds during and after the Second World War. This picture of No. 77426 was taken at Brighton, where it had just been outshopped from the former LBSCR workshops following overhaul. It had recently returned from service in France - one of 935 2-8-0s to be built, chiefly for deployment overseas. Built by North British, Glasgow, the WD-owned machine (originally No. 7426) spent the first year of its life on loan to the Southern Railway and was allocated to Bricklayers Arms (February-December 1944) before being loaned to the SNCF following the successful D-Day landings. The eight-coupled brute returned after the end of the hostilities via the Dunkirk-Dover train ferry, but its exact return date can only be narrowed down to somewhere between February and July 1946. Britain and the Allies had finally defeated the Nazis in 1945, but its railways were in a state of disarray following the aerial battering they had suffered during the conflict, and with considerable wear and tear on their stock and infrastructure. In need of attention, No. 77426 was temporarily stored at Warren Halt, near Dover, before being transferred to Brighton Works for overhaul. While the LNER bought 200 engines from the War Department, locomotives allocated to the Southern were merely loaned, and went to depots such as Ashford, Fratton and Redhill. Indeed, while the developing image was still dripping wet in Wilfred Beckerlegge’s darkroom, No. 77426 had already taken up residency at the LNER’s St. Margaret’s shed, Edinburgh, following the cessation of its loan. Its allocation there took the Riddles engine back to its country of origin, and it never turned a wheel in anger south of the Thames again. Robust they may have been, but it seems that Southern men didn’t take kindly to the ‘WDs’. Whether they were superior to Bulleid’s ungainly ‘Q1’ austerity 0-6-0s, in terms of reliability, economy and creature comforts, is debatable.