Dumbleton Hall sale

THANK you for reporting the unwelcome news that No. 4920 Dumbleton Hall has been exported. As one of the original small group who decided to buy a ‘Hall’, I am deeply concerned by this event.

We started in the early 1970s to raise money to buy No. 7927 Willington Hall, but then on good advice switched to obtaining No. 4920 – the oldest surviving ‘Hall’. We paid £4400 for the locomotive and it moved to Devon in June 1976. After much effort and expenditure, it ran again at Paignton in June 1992. Its running career lasted until October 1999, and then it was sidelined at Buckfastleigh until it moved to Carnforth in February 2021.

Dumbleton Hall Locomotive Ltd, and its successor South Devon Railway Trust, achieved much in the field of railway preservation, but the volunteers (and their families) made many sacrifices to save (this) part of our railway heritage for posterity.

We did not work hard to create a saleable asset that will now be denied to all of us. And it will probably never run again.

I do not know any details of the sale and who actually sold it for export, having left the Trust some time ago, but I do hope the ‘six figure sum’ is spent wisely. It is a very unwise precedent to set, as volunteers who work hard to restore our railway heritage should expect the preservation movement to respect this and not just dispose of the volunteer created assets without ensuring continued care.

Warner Bros has now deprived the preservation movement of two ‘Halls’ and I would suggest that, with all the railway prop-making expertise the film industry has recently shown, it would be perfectly possible for them to create acceptable copies for their theme parks.

I think this should be a wake-up call to all volunteers to consider carefully how their contributions are used and try to ensure that the results of their expertise are retained within our wider preservation movement. Succeeding volunteer contributions to this movement are an absolute necessity and, unless continuity of care is assured, the next generation’s efforts may not be quite so forthcoming.

David Long Chippenham