‘HALF CAB’ PURCHASE AGREED
Barrow Hill pledges to return its shed pet to steam, ten years after first attempt to acquire 1880 gem.
Barrow Hill Roundhouse has agreed to buy 1880 ‘Half Cab’ No. 41708 – and has pledged to return the engine to working order.
“We can officially announce that we are buying the ‘Half Cab’ from the 1708 Locomotive Preservation Trust,” Barrow Hill Engine Shed Society spokesman Mervyn Allcock told Steam Railway. “Both parties’ solicitors are now talking to each other and finalising the deal.”
The Staveley museum opened fresh negotiations to secure the engine last autumn. Mr Allcock reports that 1708 LPT trustees told the Derbyshire charity that “they have the necessary documents to prove that the ‘1F’ is legally theirs”.
If the deal does go through by the end of January, as anticipated by the trust and Barrow Hill, it would free the locomotive from a long-running wrangle that first emerged in 1985 when two of its trustees, John Payn and Brian Ashby, claimed personal ownership of the engine.
They were voted off the board; their subsequent attempt in 2006 to hand the engine over to the National Railway Museum became entangled in the ownership tussle and fell through.
Two years earlier, the trust’s own plan to pass ownership to the Waterman Railway Heritage Trust foundered when Messrs Payn and Ashby intervened to re-state their claim to No. 41708.
By the time of Pete Waterman’s £100,000 overhaul offer in 2004, the 139-year-old Derby veteran had only been out of traffic for a year. It was considered by Company Secretary Graham Mimms as the only realistic option for the engine to be overhauled again with no money in the trust’s own funds to pay for the necessary work (SR327).
Barrow Hill’s agreement to acquire No. 41708 includes provision to write off the trust’s debts. The engine shed society first attempted to bring the Johnson engine into its collection in 2009, by which time it had gained the support of the NRM.
“It’s very exciting,” Mr Allcock said. “Funds are available to buy it and start the restoration. It will be done carefully, in order to keep it as authentic as possible.”
It is planned that such a rebuild will be under way by 2020, when the roundhouse marks its 150th year.
He describes the planned restoration as one of the “last two pieces of the jigsaw of a 1960s re-creation” of the roundhouse; the other being the rebuild of the coal stage (see panel).
The ‘Half Cab’ first returned to Barrow Hill in July 1998 for its public reopening and has since spent the majority of the time at the shed to which it was first allocated between 1947 and 1965, for shunting at Staveley Iron Works.