HOW TO GET THERE
By rail: Given Robert’s proximity to Stratford station, the best and easiest way to see it is by rail. Stratford is on the Central and Jubilee London Underground lines and is also served by Docklands Light Railway and London Overground services. It is also served by Greater Anglia and c2c national rail trains from London Liverpool Street, Southend, Colchester and Ipswich.
By bus: As the sixth busiest station in Britain and the busiest London station outside central London, Stratford is well served by other forms of public transport, with the TfL 25, 86, 104, 158, 238, 257, 262, 473, 678, D8 and N86 bus routes all calling at Stratford. Check the tfl.gov.uk website for details.
By car: If you choose to travel by car, the nearest car park is the multi-storey car park in the Stratford Shopping Centre (postcode E15 1XE). Parking charges apply.
then the Midland Railway at Butterley, where it reacquired its old name.
No. 2068’s links with London started in 1993, when it was sold to the Dockland Development Corporation and taken to Kew Bridge Steam Museum (now the London Museum of Water & Steam), where it was repainted in a similar red livery to locomotives used at the famous Beckton Gas Works. The following year, it was plinthed at the Windsor Terrace entrance to the old gas works – once the largest producer of town gas in Europe – where it stayed for six years.
In 1999, the DCC was disbanded and ownership of Robert was handed to Newham Borough Council and, the following year, the six-coupled saddle tank was moved to a plinth in Meridian Square, outside Stratford station.
That wasn’t the end of the story, however. In March 2008, after Stratford had been chosen as the primary location for the 2012 Olympic Games, Robert was moved to the East Anglian Railway Museum at Chappel & Wakes Colne to make way for the preparatory construction works. Here, it was repainted into ‘Colchester Crimson’ – believed to be as close as possible to Robert’s original livery – by the same company which had once supplied the Great Eastern Railway, at the expense of the Olympic Delivery Authority.
Robert returned to Stratford in 2011, where it remains to this day, its once bright red paintwork dulled by the sun, wind and rain – a decidedly analogue machine in a digital environment.
Next time you visit our great metropolis, why not pay your respects to this nomadic machine which has travelled from Britain’s rural ironstone quarries to the nation’s capital and most points in between?
Why not pay your respects to this nomadic machine which has travelled from Britain’s rural ironstone quarries to the nation’s capital?