HAGLEY’S OVER-‘HALL’
After 36 years, Hagley Hall is on the brink of returning to steam at the Severn Valley Railway.
Thirty-six years. That’s how long it has been since ‘49XX’ No. 4930 Hagley Hall last steamed. That’s almost half the lifetime of the preservation movement. Your author wasn’t even born, and the editor was still in short trousers when this Collett 4-6-0 bowed out. Small wonder then why Hagley Hall’s imminent return is so anticipated.
Premier player
Visiting Bridgnorth MPD on the Severn Valley Railway – Hagley Hall’s home since its escape from Barry in January 1973 – you can feel the palpable sense of excitement around the ‘Hall’s’ comeback. After all, this is a locomotive steeped in Severn Valley history; it was allegedly purchased by the SVR Holdings Company plc not because it was the best of the ‘Halls’ in Barry at the time, but because Viscount Cobham – who was on the company board and close friends with the SVR’s notorious then-chairman, Sir Gerald Nabarro – lived at its namesake, just a few miles from Kidderminster.
Hagley Hall was also something of a standard bearer for the SVR. Almost immediately after its return to steam in August 1979, it was out hauling railtours on the main line and, on July 30 1984, it was chosen to haul the official opening train to the line’s new terminus at Kidderminster. To many among the SVR’s management, staff and volunteers, No. 4930 was the ‘Premier Line’s’ premier locomotive.
One person with a more intimate knowledge of Hagley Hall’s history than most is the SVR’s head of engineering Martin White. Although he’s only been a paid member of staff for four and a half years, Martin started volunteering at ‘the Valley’ a month before his 15th birthday in 1976.
“I was still at school when I started spending a week or a fortnight of my summer holidays here at Bridgnorth; once the locomotives had gone off shed, I would do whatever work was necessary in the shed,” recalls Martin. “In about 1977/78, I found
myself working mid-week with Ray Tranter, who was on the paid staff, completing the overhaul from scrapyard condition of Hagley Hall. I just became more and more involved in it,” recalls Martin.
“It was one of the first locomotives I rode on as a member of the main line support crew; I remember being on the footplate on a Welsh Marches trip out of Newport, and just being astounded at both what was happening to me but also at how casual and blasé the BR blokes seemed to be – I could barely stand up and they were having a conversation about what was on Match of the Day that night!”
Like so many of the early Barry departees, Hagley Hall’s initial restoration was a relatively basic affair – certainly nowhere near as extensive as its latest overhaul. Martin says: “The restoration was done to the best of people’s abilities at the time, so there wasn’t a vast amount of work done on it back then, but there wasn’t on any locomotive on any railway which was being restored from scrapyard condition when the locomotive had probably only been in the scrapyard maybe ten years or so.”
Flying the flag
Hagley Hall was soon being hailed as the SVR’s flagship engine. But how, exactly, did it acquire that exalted status?
“I’m not sure Hagley Hall ever actually was that special,” asserts Martin. “I think it was a suitable locomotive in the right place at the right time. Actually, I think it became the flagship through Severn Valley hype, probably – and it might have even been [former SVR general manager] Michael Draper simply saying, ‘We need a flagship’.”
Dave Fulcher-Insull – Hagley Hall’s project leader – has a different take on it. Like Martin, Dave’s involvement with No. 4930 began in childhood, and watching Hagley Hall open Kidderminster station when he was only seven years old left a big impression: “As a young boy, I was looking at this lovely, shiny green engine and then seeing it out for ‘GWR 150’… wow,” he says, grinning.
It was these formative encounters that led him to taking on the mantle of project leader back in the summer of 2018, at a time when the overhaul was losing momentum. “I had done a couple of engines here just as a normal bloke on the shop floor. Suddenly, I had this chance to work on the flagship engine of the railway, so I thought, ‘Why not give it a go?’. Luckily, I got the job and it’s been nice to make a difference on the flagship engine.”
As to how it became the flagship, “I’m not entirely sure,” says Dave. “I just know that all the plastic bags and polystyrene cups used to have Hagley Hall on them, and it was considered the flagship engine, but I don’t actually know how it came about.
“I’m hoping it will be again,” he adds, “because the railway has nothing else that’s even considered a flagship engine really.”
In terms of prestige, stepping in at the eleventh hour to replace a failed King George V on the Plymouth-Bristol ‘Great Western Limited’ with Hinton Manor during the ‘GWR 150’ celebrations on April 8 1985 takes some beating. Martin was on the ‘Manor’s’ support crew; it had failed at Exeter on the previous day’s Bristol-Plymouth ‘Great Western Limited’ and, after repairs, went light engine-andcoach to Plymouth Laira for disposal.
“I remember, at about 4am, myself and a couple of the volunteer support crew were walking back to the support coach to make a brew, and round the corner came Hagley Hall – light engine,
The restoration was done to the best of people’s abilities at the time, so there wasn’t a vast amount of work done on it back then
Bridgnorth to Plymouth, overnight, on Easter Sunday night; how did BR manage to find steam men to do that at such short notice?” remembers an astonished Martin.
Alas, the following October, Hagley Hall was withdrawn with defective boiler stays, after just seven years in traffic. The required repairs were, allegedly, insignificant, but if that’s the case, why did it take until 2013 for the overhaul to start?
“You have to remember what the Severn Valley was like back then,” explains Martin. “We had lots of locomotives and the railway had, for decades, this rotational cycle; a locomotive goes out of use but doesn’t return to traffic straight away because there is another locomotive that preceded it coming out of use. That was certainly how the Severn Valley was operating in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. So, quite simply, it wasn’t Hagley Hall’s turn at that point.
“The boiler stays themselves might have been insignificant, but you have to remember that the locomotive itself had clocked up many thousands of miles, so it would be foolhardy just to look at it from the perspective of ‘we can do a quick boiler repair and carry on running it’. It wouldn’t have been far off needing substantial mechanical repairs to axleboxes, the motion, cylinders, the frames and so on.”
A complex thing
So it turned out to be. Hagley Hall’s overhaul has cost around £1.25 million – a massive sum which, alas, is becoming all too common for overhauls these days.
Between 1986 and 1999, the ‘Hall’ was stored outside at Bridgnorth like many other SVR locomotives at the time. “It’s sad to say, the damage they incurred was not dissimilar to the sorts of things that had gone on at Barry,” admits Martin. That period outside “undoubtedly” contributed to the work that has been needed on Hagley Hall. Martin says: “It’s difficult to say exactly how much; Hagley Hall hasn’t required a new boiler barrel, for instance. But then things like the cab superstructure – it has new cabsides on now – almost certainly deteriorated when it was stored outside.
“The dragbox on the locomotive beneath the cab would have been in a pretty poor state anyway, but being stored outside, the rain would have got into the cab and continued soaking into the steelwork, which would have already been corroded by coal dust and so on, and it would have just retained the moisture.”
Perhaps the biggest single cost has been the new cylinder block. “We didn’t know that it needed a new cylinder block,” says Martin. “We suspected it would because we knew the old block had been patched up, but I well remember on the day it was lifted out, we split the halves of the cylinder block in two. We set to with chipping hammers and so on to knock the scale off it and, about 20 minutes later, people had put holes through the cast iron, and we realised it was very, very rotten.
“It’s certainly not the first to have a new cylinder
The journey back to steam begins!
Hall is winched carefully out of the MacArthur Glen shopping centre in Swindon on June 7 2007, having been on display there since 1999. Its arrival at the SVR was delayed until 2008, owing to the severe storms which severed the railway just weeks after left Swindon. BOB SWEET
block, but it was quite a complex thing because there were no Collett ‘49XX’ drawings. Didcot didn’t have any. We tried the National Railway Museum; there might be drawings, but they’re not catalogued, so we then had to go through the whole process of reverse engineering to get modern-day CAD drawings done, patterns made, castings made, then those castings needed to be machined, valve liners and so on fitted.”
Then there’s the boiler, the overhaul of which was contracted out to Northern Steam Engineering in Stockton. “People might wonder why we didn’t do the boiler in-house, and the simple answer is that we did not have the capacity – along with everything else that was going on – to be able to do Hagley Hall’s boiler in the sort of timeframe that we wanted and need to return it to traffic,” explains Martin. He adds: “As head of engineering, now, I would not envisage that we would send a boiler off a Severn Valley locomotive to an external supplier for overhaul. In no way is that a criticism of Northern Steam Engineering or any other external body, nor is it a criticism of my predecessor – I was involved in the decision to send it away – but I just think that we are going to have to focus more on our own locomotives.”
The boiler has had a new front tubeplate, a new throatplate, a new doorplate, and new three-quarter sides. The copper firebox was removed and “had had a lot of work done on it,” says Martin, while the foundation ring has had some cracks repaired. That’s in addition to a full re-staying and re-tube. “It’s had a very thorough an extensive boiler overhaul, but in the realms of the modern-day steam world, that’s not unusual,” says Martin.
Expect the unexpected
Despite arriving at Barry with a correct Collett 4,000-gallon tender, No. 4930 left with a flat-sided Hawksworth example (the Collett tender eventually went with ‘2884’ 2-8-0 No. 3845). When ‘Modified Hall’ No. 6960 Raveningham Hall arrived at the SVR in May 1977, it came with a Collett 4,000-gallon tender. An agreement was soon reached for the locomotives to swap tenders so they would be paired with the appropriate design, but they exchanged them back again when No. 6960 departed for the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway in 1996.
To ensure that Hagley Hall was historically accurate when it eventually returned to steam, the Friends of Hagley Hall (more of which anon) agreed to exchange No. 4930’s Hawksworth tender with the Collett 4,000-gallon tender paired with the David Clarke Railway Trust’s ‘Modified Hall’ No. 6990
Witherslack Hall.
Alas, No. 6990’s Collett tender has required substantial work. “The tender tyres have been renewed. About the front four feet of the tender frames and the dragbox have been renewed. It’s got a new tender tank and coal space, and a lot of new pipework,” explains Martin. As a result, the tender “is almost 50% new,” Martin reckons. It has also been outshopped in 1934 GWR ‘shirtbutton’ livery, which
Hagley Hall carried during its final years in steam and which isn’t carried by any of its classmates.
Elsewhere, there’s a new rear dragbox; the bogie and driving wheels have been re-tyred; all the locomotive and tender springs are new; a large number of cab fittings are also new; much of the boiler cladding has been repaired or replaced, and there’s also a new blastpipe and chimney. All in all, it’s been a properly thorough job.
“We didn’t expect that we’d need a new chimney cast,” says Martin. “We’re currently trying to get the characteristic Great Western copper cap sorted – that’s proving to be more difficult than envisaged because there aren’t as many metal-spinning companies, and something of that size is quite a challenging job.
“There have been some unexpected things
but, if you’re going to do a full nuts-and-bolts overhaul on a steam locomotive these days – especially an ex-BR steam locomotive – you should expect the unexpected.”
Despite the significant amount of new material, the SVR hasn’t obliterated Hagley Hall’s battle scars, as Dave explains. He elected to have the frames shotblasted, as “it’s one of those jobs where it’s getting harder and harder to get people to come and scrape dirty old frames because – let’s face it – it’s not good fun.
“By having it shotblasted, one of the interesting things was that it showed up a lot more detail of certain things, like tool marks, so we purposely kept those. I said to Ronan in the paint shop not to touch them because want to keep them in as a detail, then one of the other chaps came in and filled over them! I had to say, ‘Do you remember where they were? Dig them out again!’.
“I’d like to think that sort of thing becomes the norm. If you get volunteers to come and scrape the frames down, that’s months of work. We got the shotblasters in and, in a day, it was primed, so if you want instant progress, that’s the thing to do. It’s all about any kind of savings you can make on time.”
Despite the work that’s gone into Hagley Hall, it won’t be returning to the national network. “I have never considered putting it back on the main line and I don’t think anybody on the Severn Valley has either,” says Martin. “It’s a different world now. When the
Severn Valley had locomotives out on the main line, it was the icing on the cake for us; it’s not our core business. The whole railway infrastructure has moved on, so in my view, there was never any intention that we’d return Hagley Hall to the main line.”
Taking charge
None of the above would have been possible without the Friends of Hagley Hall. It was initially formed by a group of young volunteers at Bewdley MPD – the traditional GWR heart of the SVR (Bridgnorth is regarded as a Midland shed). Martin says: “They saw Hagley Hall sat there with nothing being done to it, and because the holdings company has plenty of other things to spend its money on, they concluded that, unless somebody could provide an additional source of funding, its turn in the queue would never come about. So they started raising money, and they’ve been very successful in doing so, raising a substantial six-figure sum over the years.
“But, more important than raising money was raising the profile. Having a sales stand at Kidderminster raised the profile of the locomotive and people become interested in it. We’ve got volunteers working on Hagley Hall today who only decided to work on it because they first came across it via the sales stand at Kidderminster.”
Another major contributor towards the costs of the overhaul has been the SVR Charitable Trust,