NATIONAL TREASURES: 1008
Exploring Britain’s other ‘Radial tank’
It has a wooden chimney and bits of it are filled with putty, but otherwise Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway 2-4-2T No. 1008 is probably still fit for service in ex-Horwich Works condition. As talks commence to return it to its birthplace for display, we find out more.
January has been a rollercoaster month of emotions for enthusiasts of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, who will have felt unbridled elation at the long-awaited return to steam of 0-6-0ST No. 752, coupled with bleak despair as demolition crews tear into the heart of the old company – the surviving erecting shop at Horwich Works.
Still standing proud as a monument to the ‘Lanky’ more than 50 years after it outshopped its last engines, the magnificent red-brick building is being wiped off the map to make way for a new road and surrounding housing development. In a bitter irony, it’s not just the march of progress that has sounded the death knell for the works, but its own past – in the form of asbestos boiler and cylinder lagging from the legions of ‘Crab’ 2-6-0s, ‘Lanky’ 0-6-0s, and tank engines, that passed through here for attention in steam days. The known sites of dumps hoarding the deadly material meant that the road could go nowhere but straight through the site of the erecting shop.
Yet Horwich Works has left behind a tangible legacy – not just the surviving locomotives that it constructed, but some buildings that will escape the bulldozers – and ‘Lanky’ fans can take heart from the news that there are proposals to display two of those engines on the site.
SIGNIFICANT SURVIVOR
Keen to commemorate its history, an enlightened Bolton Council has opened talks with the National Railway Museum for the loan of its two LYR locomotives – Aspinall Class ‘5’ 2-4-2T No. 1008 and 18in-gauge Horwich Works shunter Wren – to be displayed on the site of the works as part of a proposed ‘heritage core’.
There could be no more appropriate exhibit than No. 1008, which holds the distinction of being the very first locomotive completed at Horwich, in February 1889.
It is also historically significant as the sole standard gauge 2-4-2T in mainland Britain, and likely to remain so for some time, until new-build GER ‘F5’ No. 789 is completed (Northern Ireland has a 5ft 3in gauge example of this wheel arrangement, GNR(I) ‘JT’ class No. 93 Sutton, on display in the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum at Cultra).
We all know and love ex-Lyme Regis branch Adams ‘Radial’ 4-4-2T No. 30583 at the Bluebell Railway, but No. 1008 is a ‘Radial tank’ too, employing the same arrangement of lateral movement on its leading and trailing truck wheelsets to help it negotiate sharp curves and reduce flange wear.
With a typically ornate pre-Grouping livery enhancing its handsome but rather plain lines, it’s a lovely little machine to admire in the NRM’s Great Hall, but is all too easy to overlook alongside the more glamorous exhibits.
But every locomotive has its story to tell – and thanks to L&Y fan Richard Greenwood, who we have met elsewhere in this issue as one of the founder members of the scheme to save No. 752, we can hear the tale of the other ‘Radial tank’.
COUNTING THE RIVETS…
Withdrawn from Bradford’s Manningham shed on September 15 1954, with 1,506,294 miles on the clock, No. 50621 (its BR number) was claimed for the National Collection and sent to Horwich Works for restoration.
Says Richard: “The story goes that, after they did it up, they steamed it and took it on a test run to Chorley and back, although the date isn’t known.
“I once went on its footplate in the NRM, and there were still the remains of a fire on the grate, which backs this up.”
But then, he continues, along came Eric Mason – a former Horwich Works apprentice who later rose to the rank of Shed Foreman at Agecroft from 1919 to 1939, and also became a prolific writer on the subject of the L&Y – sometimes using the pseudonym ‘Rivington’ after Rivington Pike, the large hill that overshadows Horwich. Appropriately, this name lives on at the works today, in ‘Rivington House’ – the new name of the former office building now occupied by loan broker Fluent Money Ltd, which is planning its own tribute to the site’s history with railway-themed displays in its workplace.
On seeing the 2-4-2T, Richard continues: “Eric said the chimney was the wrong shape, several other details such as the lubricators were wrong, and the rivets were snap-head when the L&Y used countersunk ones.
“So they took the chimney off and made one out of laminated wood – at one stage, you could see in the museum where the blocks of wood were coming through the paint and varnish – and replaced the other incorrect fittings with wooden ones.
“On the join between the water and coal spaces in the bunker, they replaced one in five rivets with countersunk ones… and filled the rest of the holes with putty!”
‘LIGHT REPAIR’
Yet, despite all this, he concludes: “I don’t know whether it had a full overhaul or just a casual one – but it probably wouldn’t take much to get it running.”
Anthony Coulls, the NRM’s Senior Curator of Rail Transport & Technology, says: “It looks like a light repair really, and it wasn’t repainted at that time,” and neither the 2-4-2T nor Wren are included in the NRM’s current Operational Rail Vehicle Strategy.
It would be wonderful, for sure, to see No. 1008 at the head of the LYR Trust’s exquisitely restored rake of ‘Lanky’ carriages on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, or perhaps returned to its BR condition and scuttling around Bury Bolton Street on station pilot duty.
Such things are nice to dream about, but on the other hand, do we really need to run it?
As we find on pages 49-53, every other surviving LYR locomotive outside the National Collection – five out of seven – could be in action during the coming years. That’s surely plenty for even the most diehard devotee, and perhaps No. 1008 is better left untouched, as a point of reference to make sure that those engines are maintained in an authentic condition?
Indeed, the 2-4-2T has already helped No. 752 in that way, says Richard: “About three or four years ago, I went underneath 1008 to check the trailing drawbar arrangement, as the National Coal Board had mucked around with the one on 752…”
It’s nice to know that No. 1008 might be in a condition to be returned to steam, if we wanted to. But for now, if it is to remain a static exhibit, it’s heartwarming simply to think that it might go back to its birthplace, as a lasting memorial to the thousands of other engines that were built, overhauled and repaired there at the hands of generations of local workers.
I don’t know whether it had a full overhaul or just a casual one – but it probably wouldn’t take much to get it running RICHARD GREENWOOD