FROM GLASGOW TO LYME REGIS
The engine we know today was a product of Glasgow’s Neilson, Reid & Co. (Works No. 3209), one of four firms engaged to build the 71 engines when the original, rickety LSWR Nine Elms Works was struggling for capacity.
Entering service in March 1885, No. 488 was a frequent sight working out of Nine Elms shed to destinations in Surrey, as well as Basingstoke and Reading. Unfortunately, it was another of Adams’ designs, the ‘T1s’, that were quickly eating into No. 488’s commuter duties before the turn of the century and it was swiftly dispatched to Exeter in 1895; then Bournemouth around 1900; ending up at Eastleigh in 1905.
In March 1914, the 29-year-old engine was condemned, as the LSWR geared up for electrification. No. 488 was placed on the LSWR’s duplicate list and renumbered 0488, while its old number was ominously allocated to one of Robert Urie’s new breed of ‘H15’ 4-6-0s. Its fall from grace was almost complete when it was moved into Eastleigh’s lines of doomed locomotives, but the intervention of the First World War forced a rethink on resources, meaning that many of the dumped ‘Radials’ avoided being scrapped, including No. 0488.
Bought in 1917 for £2,107 by the Ministry of Munitions, No. 0488 moved to its salvage depot at Ridham Dock in Kent and was numbered 27. In late 1919, it moved to the Ministry’s General Stores Depot, 30 miles east at Belvedere. Then, in 1920, Colonel H.F. Stephens stepped in to buy No. 27 for £900 – less than half what the Government had paid for it three years earlier – and the nomad 4-4-2T was turned out for service on his East Kent Railway in April 1921. Here it was engaged on goods trains serving the Kent coalfield, in particular Tilmanstone Colliery, and on passenger services on the 11½-mile line between Shepherdswell and Canterbury Road – still painted in LSWR lined green livery, albeit with a number 5 patch-painted over its former identity.
That status quo remained until 1935 when the 50-year-old ‘Radial’ was sent to Ashford Works for an overhaul and repaint into a version of the Southern Railway’s Maunsell lined green – but retaining its light railway identity.
There are conflicting reports of when No. 5 last ran on the EKR, but the majority agree it was sidelined in March 1939 on the eve of another world war.
Amazingly, the locomotive was again kept aside – unused – presumably as a ‘strategic reserve’ until, after cessation of conflict, the Southern Railway came calling for an engine that it might otherwise have absorbed in 1923.
In 1946, however, the cash-strapped EKR wanted its value for the ‘0415’. Differing sources disagree over the price: some suggest that this was £120; others £800. Either way, it was capital for an engine that the EKR’s nationalised successor would have otherwise acquired for nothing two years later!
The SR’s need was urgent, though, because its only pair of ‘Radials’, by then numbered 3125 and 3520, required heavy overhauls – and trials with other designs of locomotive on the Lyme Regis branch were unsuccessful.
Having drafted in the EKR machine, there was increased flexibility for wash-outs and maintenance among the trio, without leaving the branch line short of motive power. Its boiler was swapped with one of the Drummond designs and it was turned out from Eastleigh Works in Bulleid-era plain black as No. 3488 and allocated to Exmouth Junction.
It was in this, and its later BR lined black form, that the ‘0415’ performed stoically for almost 15 years with its two sisters over the challenging route to the English Channel, as well as occasionally being drafted in for use on the Seaton branch and crew training at Exmouth Junction shed itself.
With more than 1,600,000 miles under its belt, No. 30583’s official withdrawal came in the week beginning July 22 1961, albeit more than a week after it had already been delivered by rail to the Bluebell!