 A mixed bag of Classes fours, fives and nines in the
Keep sidings at Carnforth. inset Man with an awful lot of scrap on his hands. Mr. Alan
Earl, Station Manager at Carnforth. |
THE last
mournful whistle has shrilled out for them across the land; a sad, stirringly plaintive
sound that will bring gloom to the devotees. A few more great, labouring breaths and
Britain's steam engines will have cantankerously rolled into history.
Always aggressive. Always busily fussing their way on some urgent destination. The rumble
and clank of happy metal, sweet music to the train-spotter. But by August, they will have
gone; replaced by the smooth-lined humming diesels. And, I, for one, will shed a
soot-stained tear at their passing.
Think of those buttermilk summer days watching the coal-black giants rip by on shimmering
rails. ..pulling coaches of blurred businessmen, waving hands, football scarves, buckets
and spades - and ,half-a-ton of Blackpool beach!
Remember the tingling lump-in-your-throat feeling, as with watering eyes, you hopefully
watched the blank tunnel entrance for the engines that could drop neatly into the hole of
your battered train-spotter's book. "Did you get the number ?... what shed was it
from? ...blimey, its a 'namer'!" Fun. But not childhood nostalgia; for I grew up
with the steamers. And I suffered them too, The cold carriages, with windows never made to
open. Those terrible halts in the middle of nowhere in a non-corridor train while some
mysterious person crunched his way along the gravel, tapping wheels.
Ironically, from a railway history point of view it isn't Darlington or Crewe or Liverpool
or Derby that is waving the last good-bye to steam. It is the matter-of-fact North
Lancashire town of Carnforth that will wish "bon- voyage" to them. Here, already
the locomotives are unobtrusively making their final pilgrimage to the engine sheds.
Buffer to tender, they are lined up, ready to be shipped off to some hard-headed scrap
merchant.
Twenty-four still operate. Running the gauntlet of envy from their silent brothers queuing
in the rusty sidings. They wear the cobwebs and corrosion as an uneasy corpse's shroud.
There are the hulking Britannia class engines; Class Nine locos that gobbled seven tons of
shiny coal on a one hundred mile journey, "Black Fives", the workhorses of
British Rail's fleet of goods-passenger trains. Sadly, some have already fallen victims of
the over- keen spotters, who have removed brass screws, shed numbers - and even tried to
take number plates. So the engines for their own protection, must die an anonymous death
All movable parts have been taken away by rail staff. The Station Manager, Mr. Alan Earl,
who controls the millions of pounds worth of sophisticated diesels at the Motive Power,
says: "The engines could be repaired with a cold chisel and a spanner. We shall miss
them." |
