DIMINUTIVE BAGNALL JOINS NORTH YORKSHIRE MOORS RAILWAY FLEET
A Bagnall 0-4-0ST that has led a secret life for the last seven years has joined the North Yorkshire Moors Railway fleet – and should steam in 2020 for the first time in 40 years.
It will perform at special events and be used for steam heating duties, alongside another diminutive industrial engine: Cockerill 0-4-0VBT No. 8 ‘Lucie’.
It was an article in Steam Railway (SR396) in 2012 that brought the Middleton Railway’s surplus Bagnall 0-4-0ST Works No. 2702 to the attention of enthusiast and NYMR driver Mark Richards, who then purchased it.
Mr Richards, with son Bertie (an NYMR cleaner), moved the Bagnall to a private storage site to allow its condition to be investigated. However, the boiler is now being stripped at Grosmont shed, where a new throatplate is to be formed along with a new barrel, tubeplate, smokebox and other platework.
It is not the first Grosmont link with Bagnall. The family locomotive building and iron businesses expanded out of Staffordshire, when Charles Bagnall travelled to the ironstone-rich Esk valley, married a Whitby girl in 1860 and set up Grosmont Ironworks that eventually employed 500 people.
Mr Richards told Steam Railway: “With a family from Stafford, my grandfather working at the Patent Shaft & Axletree steelworks, which made axles for Bagnall in West Bromwich, and the Grosmont link, the connections are strong… it falls to us to get 2702 back into steam.”
The 0-4-0ST was delivered in 1943 to the government shadow factory at Monk Bretton, near Barnsley, operated by the big Firth-Brown Steel manufacturing group for the Ministry of Supply, where secrecy surrounded its use in the production of tanks and armour plate for the war effort. After the war, Firth-Brown moved the locomotive to its site in Sheffield: the Atlas & Norfolk Steel works which, along with steel and heavy forging, made tyres and axles for the railways.
Bagnall listed the design as E2702 for many years in their catalogues, but with the demand for ever-larger locomotives, it actually remained unique.
The engine could have been scrapped in 1963 when it was sent to breakers George Cohen of Stanningley, Leeds. However, its good condition and small proportions meant Cohens used it for a period to shunt their own scrapyards.
It was subsequently saved again in 1966 by the Middleton Railway, where it was kept in working order until the late 1970s.