No. 5025’s epic overhaul nears completion
Documenting the remarkable life and incredible return to steam of Britain’s oldest surviving ‘Black Five’ – No. 5025.
Your author was still in nappies when ‘Black Five’ No. 5025 was taken out of traffic at the Strathspey Railway in 1993, so to say that its return to steam has been a long time coming is, therefore, something of an understatement. However, No. 5025 absolutely proves that the best things in life are worth waiting for, and that if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, for not only has it undergone one of the most extensive and comprehensive overhauls in preservation, the team has also reverted it as close as possible to its original 1934 condition. For those that value authenticity, historic accuracy and attention to detail, No. 5025 is a jewel.
Scottish start
Don’t let the number deceive you. Because the initial 50 Vulcan Foundry-built ‘Black Fives’ (Nos. 5020-69) were completed before the first Crewe-built locomotives (Nos. 5000-19), No. 5025 was in fact the sixth built, making it Britain’s oldest surviving example – being six months older than National Collection No. 5000.
Given the class’ association with the Highlands and its inextricable links to Strathspey, No. 5025 is widely regarded as a Scottish engine, yet it was only allocated to a Scottish shed for a very brief period during its working life – from August 1934 until its transfer to Edge Hill in October 1935.
During that time, however, it did run over the
former Aviemore-Forres line – which, since 1975, has been its preservation home – as it was one of ten ‘Black Fives’ (Nos. 5020-29) allocated from new to Perth to alleviate the LMS’ motive power struggles on the Highland Main Line by replacing older pre-Grouping designs. However, their original 14-element superheated boilers proved inadequate for the steeply graded route, so they were substituted by the end of 1935 with 21-element superheated ‘Black Fives’ and dispersed around the LMS system.
No. 5025 gained notoriety for all the wrong reasons (perhaps prophetically) on Friday October 13, 1939, when it and ‘Royal Scot’ No. 6130 The West Yorkshire Regiment
– with which it was double-heading a Euston-Stranraer express – collided head-on with an LNWR ‘G1’ 0-8-0
No. 9169 at Bletchley while it was shunting a van onto the rear of the preceding Euston-Inverness train.
Four people were killed and six seriously injured, with a further 34 people receiving minor injuries in what was the first railway accident of the Second World War attributable to the hostilities; though primarily caused by the failure of No. 5025’s driver to observe six adverse signals on the approach to Bletchley, the wartime blackout conditions were also partly to blame.
Despite derailing and mounting the wreckage, No. 5025 was subsequently repaired and returned to service, thereafter settling down into the largely routine way of life of a mixed traffic locomotive.
1968 and all that
It wasn’t until the final years of BR main line steam that No. 5025 would return to the spotlight.
Renumbered 45025 in February 1950, by 1968 it was the oldest standard gauge locomotive on BR’s books (only the trio of 1ft 11½in gauge Vale of Rheidol Railway tanks, built in 1923/24, were older). It had also been allocated to Carnforth, one of BR’s last steam sheds, making it ideally placed to take part in the end of steam finale.
From February 1968, No. 45025 was regularly rostered on BR’s last steam-hauled named train, the prestigious Manchester-Heysham ‘Belfast Boat Express’, and regularly achieved 80mph on these runs before working the last steam-hauled ‘Boat’ on May 5 that year.
On August 4, No. 45025 double-headed with classmate No. 45390 on the Carnforth-Hellifield-Lostock Hall leg of the Locomotive Club of Great Britain’s ‘Farewell to Steam’ railtour. Alas, this was No. 45025’s swan song, for although it was in steam on August 11 as a spare engine for the ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’ that day, it wasn’t needed and was thus withdrawn.
So ended No. 45025’s career, which spanned the entire lifetime of what was arguably Stanier’s finest design, from their glorious inception to their ignominious, begrimed final days at the very end of BR main line steam.
Worth saving
Enter William Edward Charteris Watkinson, better known as Ted. A former dairy farmer and MG works driver who raced his MG ND Magnette at Brooklands during the 1930s, Ted wanted to purchase a locomotive from BR for the embryonic Strathspey Railway, having first fallen in love with the Highland Line during a family holiday to Nairn in August 1926.
The late Scottish Region Locomotive Engineer Vernon Atkinson, who died in 2019 aged 98, furnished Ted with a list of ‘Black Fives’ in good mechanical condition, which
included No. 45025 – probably because it had been given a ‘heavy intermediate’ overhaul at Crewe in April/May 1966 and then stored from August 1966 to January 1968, so it had done relatively little mileage since leaving the works. Ted’s decision to buy No. 45025 was also likely influenced by its previous association with the Aviemore-Forres route, thereby giving Strathspey a ‘local’ engine.
However, No. 45025 was inadvertently sold to scrap merchant Albert Draper & Son Ltd of Hull in September 1968. Fortunately, the misunderstanding was quickly resolved, and Ted took ownership of the ‘Black Five’ in November 1968.
However, as negotiations with BR to secure the trackbed were still ongoing, the Strathspey Railway wasn’t ready to receive the ‘5MT’. The only suitable alternative at that time was the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, which had only opened that June as one of the then few standard gauge preserved railways, and which was connected by rail to Carnforth, so Ted arranged for No. 45025 to move there on April 23 1969 via the Hunslet Engine Company in nearby Leeds for mechanical attention.
Following a nine-week overhaul, which included repairs to a cracked frame, No. 45025 broke the BR steam ban by running under its own power to the KWVR on June 30 1969. There it was repainted into its original LMS livery as No. 5025 and returned to service on September 12 1970.
Main line pioneer
The ‘Black Five’ stayed at the ‘Worth Valley’ for another four years, its residence prolonged by the withdrawal of the Scottish Railway Preservation Society from the Strathspey project in the belief that Aviemore was too far for the largely Scottish Lowlands-based volunteers to support on a regular basis. However, by the end of 1974, work at Strathspey under the newly formed Strathspey Railway Company was well advanced so, on December 2 – after accumulating 4,050 miles of running on the Oxenhope branch – No. 5025 was towed by a Class 25 diesel to Kilmarnock for overhaul by Andrew Barclay Sons & Co.
Following a test run to Ayr, No. 5025 travelled under its own steam to Aviemore on May 29 1975 and hauled its first passengers over the nascent preserved line on August 27, as part of the LCGB’s ‘Grampian’ railtour.
Three years after the Strathspey opened to the public in 1978, No. 5025 hauled its first revenueearning passenger trains on the main line since 1968, when it worked a shuttle service between BR’s Glasgow Works and Garnqueen on June 27 1981, as part of the open day marking the 125th anniversary of St Rollox works. It achieved another first on May 29 1982, when it worked the first steam-hauled service to Kyle of Lochalsh from Inverness since the steam era.
Alas, No. 5025’s main line career was brief, ending in 1983 with a cracked boiler. After receiving repairs, it returned to Strathspey in 1985. This revival was short-lived, for it was out of service a year later needing further repairs. Returning in 1989, the ‘5MT’ continued running until December 1993 when it was withdrawn for overhaul – an overhaul that wouldn’t start for another 16 years.
Money well spent
The ‘Black Five’ you see now is a far cry from the one the five-strong restoration team started working on back in 2009.
“Being stored outside for seven years is what really knackered her,” says Nathan Lightowler, the Strathspey Railway’s shed foreman. “Nothing was bagged up or tarped over. It rotted the tender tank, cab and smokebox, through which the corrosion ate its way down to the cylinders and front frame plates.
“It’s also worth remembering that it had never had a proper overhaul since it last left Crewe in 1966. For instance, as far as we know, it only had a re-tube at Andrew Barclay.”
Not surprisingly, then, No. 5025 has undergone a comprehensive rebuild. Although the team knew at the start that No. 5025 would need a lot of work to return it to steam, they hadn’t anticipated the scale of the challenge they would ultimately face. Says Nathan: “We only thought we’d need to overhaul the axleboxes, make a new bufferbeam, patch the tender tank, make a new smokebox tubeplate and bits of new cladding and so on.”
The true scale of the rebuild required revealed itself early on in the overhaul, as No. 5025’s project manager Paul Blount recalls: “We were boring out the cylinders when there was this huge bang. We took the grinder out and there was an enormous crack the length of the liner. Upon collapsing the liner, we could see the cylinder casting was cracked along its length – we suspected the other cylinder would be the same and, upon inspection, it was.
“Once the cylinders were off, it was evident that
the frames behind them and the smokebox saddle were badly wasted, so we realised we would have to replace all of this.”
That alone would represent a huge challenge for any overhaul, but No. 5025 ultimately ended up being rather more extensive. In addition to new cylinders, the locomotive has had a new smokebox, a new cab (made by a SR apprentice) and a new tender tank, while the boiler has also received an extensive rebuild. The front
9ft and rear 5ft of the locomotive’s frames have also been replaced.
“Had we known the frames were that bad, we’d have probably re-framed the whole thing, using the later design of modified frames and just really gone to town on the ‘bottom end’,” says Nathan. Had they done that, they would have erased a hidden yet interesting part of No. 5025’s character, as the frame plates hail from classmates Nos. 5079 and 5214, with the left-hand frame featuring the later modified insert to increase strength. “It’s had lots of frame bodging done over the years!” jokes Nathan.
Unsurprisingly then, No. 5025’s overhaul has not been cheap, costing £519,661 and 16p; the fact the team can give its cost to the penny betrays their obsessive attention to detail.
Though the cost has been high – the original budget was £354,050 – “Every penny was well spent, and it will pay for itself in the future,” says Nathan. “Any subsequent overhaul will be substantially easier.”
Devil in the detail
Though the overhaul itself is impressive, what is arguably even more so is the finish, for No. 5025 has been reverted as close as practical back to its as-built 1934 condition – a decision actually prompted by the ‘Black Five’s’ poor condition, and one which had an unexpected upside.
“It was actually easier to put it back to 1934 condition than it would have been to overhaul it back to how it was before,” says Nathan. “There’s been less re-making stuff, like the front footplate step for example, which we’d have had to replace if we’d done her as she was.”
The front end has received the most obvious visual changes. There is no step between the frame plates, and the chimney is 2½ inches taller than the previous one (a characteristic peculiar to the first 50 Vulcan-built ‘Black Fives’). The new smokebox has been made to the 1934 pattern, the door wedge has been removed, while the dart handles are longer.
Moving further back, the cylinder lagging sheets lack the access hole covers featured on later ‘Black Fives’, the main steam pipe casings have unusual vertical scallops (believed to have been done to permit the fitting of pyrometers in the steam chest), while a maker’s plate has been attached to the smokebox sides – again, a typical Vulcan feature.
The domeless boiler too is authentic, with the top feed delivery pipes outside the boiler cladding (also peculiar to the first Vulcan-built batch of ‘5MTs’) while the firebox has the original design of vertical throatplate; later ‘Black Fives’ had domed boilers with sloping throatplates to improve combustion. Then there’s the superheater, the reason why No. 5025 and its stablemates were moved away from the Highland Main Line in 1935.
“It’s got the original design of superheater header built for 14 elements, but it’s been bored out to accept 21,” explains Nathan. “You could actually have 28 elements there, because there’s enough material to make extra holes.” In other words, No. 5025 should be more than a match for anything the Strathspey can throw at it.
We also cannot forget the tender. Remarkably and unusually, No. 5025 has been paired with the same tender – No. 9079 – since it was built; the frames still bear the marks where they were hammered back into shape after the Bletchley accident. The tender tank is an all-new welded item made by Riley & Son (E) Ltd – who also overhauled the boiler – and finished off by a Strathspey Railway apprentice. To maintain authenticity, 1,621 dummy rivet heads have been painstakingly positioned to replicate the original design, while the tender axlebox covers are plain, as per the Vulcan Foundry pattern; Crewe-built examples had cast cruciform ribs. The 15in lettering on the tender, spaced 40 inches apart, is also as per the Vulcan engines.
Everywhere you look, there are examples of just how far the team has gone to emulate No. 5025’s as-built condition. One apprentice has even made a dummy crosshead-driven vacuum pump.
Ringing the changes
That said, the team hasn’t slavishly followed the 1934 design.
For one thing, there were elements that could not practically be changed, such as the mudhole doors on the firebox; similarly, the rivets on the driving wheel balance weights should be flush, while the valve handles in the cab should be wooden – a legacy of Stanier’s time at Swindon. The team also hasn’t been able to fit a regulator lubricator in the cab, like that on preserved LMS ‘Mogul’ No. 13268.
But these are minor deviations from the original design and largely invisible to the majority of observers. The team deviated from Stanier’s design for another reason: ergonomics. “We’ve almost designed the engine better than Stanier did. We’ve made lots of modifications,” says Nathan.
These modifications include moving the atomiser from behind the smokebox saddle to one of the frame stretchers for easier access; rerouting pipework around the cab, dragbox and lubricators to aid maintenance; adding more grease points to improve lubrication, and fitting a more reliable BR-pattern 10X injector. There are even drain holes in places susceptible to corrosion to protect the team’s hard work repairing previous corrosion damage.
All in all, the core volunteer team and full-time staff at Strathspey has made No. 5025 as good as it can possibly be. “Don’t forget it’s been done with a handful of people; you can count them all on the fingers of one hand,” adds Nathan.
Testament to all that hard work is the fact that, when No. 5025 moved under its own steam for the first time in 28 years on May 13, it worked perfectly. “To have an engine that has had that much work done on it to steam fresh out of the box with virtually no problems is astonishing,” says Nathan.
Paul likens it to “a Swiss watch or a sewing machine. There was a slight dribble from one of the injector valves, but that was about it.
“As it hadn’t been north of Boat of Garten since 1935, we did a gauging run on the following Tuesday, and it took a six-coach train up a 1-in-100 gradient with just 40psi in the steam chest; that’s very impressive.”
A lifelong dream
So, what now for No. 5025? Well, following painting into standard 1934 LMS lined black livery (the only paint scheme No. 5025 will ever carry, incidentally), the ‘Black Five’ is expected to be launched into traffic at Strathspey in July or August.
Don’t forget it’s been done with a handful of people; you can count them all on the fingers of one hand
Even though the SR is main line-connected at Aviemore, don’t expect No. 5025 to return to the national network metals anytime soon. Says Nathan: “We did look at taking it back onto the main line, but the cost was beyond what we could afford. We’d have liked to have done it – and had someone come along to pay for it we would have – but it’s just not worth it.”
Paul adds: “We’ll maybe do it sometime in the future, but not right now.”
It’s also unlikely that No. 5025 will visit any other railways for the foreseeable future, largely because Strathspey needs a third steam locomotive. “We’ll never say never, of course,” says Nathan.
So, how does it feel now that No. 5025 is, at long last, back in steam? “It’s gobsmacking. Words can’t really describe it. It’s been a lifelong dream, but it’s taken a long time to get here,” says Nathan.
Paul echoes that sentiment: “It’s been 13 years to get her into steam, so we were pleased when we opened the regulator for the first time and everything worked perfectly.”
If anything, you could liken No. 5025 to one of those ‘restomod’ cars, where artisans take a classic car and not just restore it but enhance its character and usability, improving its reliability without ruining the essence. That is exactly what the No. 5025 team has done, not only reverting it to close to as-built condition, but making subtle improvements where they can and where appropriate. The result is an engine that, even in drab primer, is a stunning piece of work.
It may have been a long time coming, but by Jove was it worth the wait. Welcome back, No. 5025.