Plinthed – but not forgotten
Continuing our series in which we help you track down some of Britain’s more elusive locomotives, we pay a visit to East London to seek out a nomadic Avonside…
Stratford station. A new millennium blend of steel, concrete and glass, it is a modern station for a modern railway – and the last place you’d expect to find a 1930s industrial steam locomotive. Yet, standing in Meridian Square outside the station front – overshadowed by the adjacent crisp, modern apartment blocks and offices – is Avonside 0-6-0ST Works No. 2068 Robert, its bulky, old fashioned outline contrasting sharply with the surrounding
21st century architecture in this highly redeveloped area of East London.
Of course, Stratford has long been associated with railways – since 1839 when the Eastern Counties Railway (later the Great Eastern Railway) opened the first station here. Then there was the nearby locomotive works, the site of which is alas now buried under the new Stratford International station and Westfield shopping centre. Indeed, the redevelopment has been so extensive that today one can easily forget this area was once the industrious, grimy hub of extensive railway activity; the Stratford of today is trendy, affluent, modern and clean – a world away from that experienced by the likes of the GER’s famed chief mechanical engineers Thomas Worsdell, James Holden or Alfred John Hill.
However, great though it is that Stratford’s railway past has been commemorated – albeit in a small way – Robert has nothing whatsoever to do with Stratford nor the Great Eastern Railway. So what on earth is it doing here?
London links
One wonders how many of the thousands of passengers and commuters passing through Stratford station each day ponder the same question. Do they look up from their newspapers and smartphones to admire this relic of a bygone age? Or do they hurry on by without giving it a second glance? If they did, they’d learn its remarkable, albeit complicated, tale. Ordered on May 22 1933 by the Staveley Coal & Iron Co. Ltd, Avonside Works No. 2068 spent the entirety of its working career at the company’s Lamport Calcine Sidings in Hanging Houghton, Northamptonshire, where it was named Robert. In 1954, a branch was laid from this short ironstone
quarry line to a tipping dock on the nearby 3ft gauge Scaldwell quarry system, where the contents of the quaint, wooden narrow gauge wagons would be discharged into the standard gauge ironstone dump cars below and taken the additional 2½ miles to the BR exchange sidings on the NorthamptonMarket Harborough line – part of which has been preserved as the Northampton & Lamport Railway.
Known latterly as Lamport No. 3, Robert worked at the sidings until September 1969 when it was sold to London Railway Preservation Society member Peter Elms and subsequently moved to the society’s London Road garage base in Bletchley for a short spell, before arriving at the society’s Quainton Road headquarters in March 1970.
It didn’t stay here long, with the first of its many preservation-era moves taking place on October 3 1971, when it left for the Foxfield Railway. According to the March 1972 edition of the LRPS’ Quainton News, “During those 18 months, very little restoration work was carried out and the Avonsidebuilt 0-6-0ST didn’t present too good an ‘image’ to the visitor.” It later went to Peak Rail in April 1986,