Books: Birlinn

The Heritage

Even in the latter days of the nationalised railway, a small but flourishing private sector had grown up which might well have contained lessons for those responsible for privatisation had they chosen to look. This was the heritage railway sector, including heritage railways, railway preservation societies and the like.

Heritage railways were vertically integrated, and remain so – they were exempted from the provisions for licensing, access and so on contained in the Railways Act 1993. That does not mean that each is the sole owner of everything to be found upon it. On the contrary, the hard task of raising funds has had the effect that each is usually home to a multitude of pieces of rolling stock and equipment owned by distinct groups as a result of separate fund-raising campaigns. So on a typical heritage railway, although the railway and its train service are operated and marketed by the railway company itself, on any particular train the locomotive is likely to belong to a separate group, and the coaches to a third, while the trackbed may well belong to the local authority acting as ground landlord. Here, therefore, is an example of multiple sources of funds, or investment, without compromising the principle of vertical integration, and one which has been found from experience to work.

Nor is that the only example which might have been studied. Once br had overcome its initial reluctance, after the end of steam, to allow steam locomotives back onto its tracks, steam specials hauled by preserved locomotives, and often composed of preserved coaches, became a regular occurrence on BR. Latterly, preserved first-generation diesel locomotives also appeared. So here were complete privately owned and funded trains running over BR. The division of responsibilities was that route and timings, or at least the final decisions on these, were decided by BR, which also provided operating staff – driver, fireman and guard – while marketing of the train and the care of customers on board were the task of the organiser.

But to begin at the beginning. Railway preservation – the concept of retaining historic railway artefacts once their useful working life was over – long preceded the end of steam on BR. It dates from the mid-nineteenth century. We are fortunate that in 1869 the brothers William and George Hedley bought the very early locomotive Wylam Dilly when her working days were over, kept her for thirteen years, and then arranged for her transfer in 1882 to the Edinburgh Museum of

Science and Arts in Chambers Street, a forerunner of the Royal Museum in which Wylam Dilly remains a prized exhibit. The locomotive had been built for their father William Hedley as early as, probably, 1814, one of two built at that time to replace horses on the Wylam waggonway near Newcastle upon Tyne. Both still exist, and are the two oldest surviving steam locomotives: Puffing Billy, probably marginallythe older of the two, went to the predecessor of theScience Museum, South Kensington, in 1862.

For the celebrations of the centenary of the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1925, which included a parade of trains old and new, the LNER restored the GNSR 4-4-0 no. 45A of 1866 to her former magnificence, polished brass dome and all, and ran her with a train of four-wheeled coaches. Afterwards, regrettably, it did not retain her indefinitely but the event, and the LNER’s subsequent establishment of its Railway Museum at York, prompted wider interest in preservation of historic equipment. The LMS preserved for their historic interest the first of the Highland Railway Jones Goods 4-6-0s, no. 103, on withdrawal in 1934, and the famous CR 4-2-2 no. 12 3 in 1935. The LNER, having started to scrap the last two North British Atlantics in 1937, responded to suggestions in the Press that one should be preserved, and reassembled no. 875 Midlothian– only to break her up a second time during the Second World War to meet the need for scrap metal.

The right of successive dukes of Sutherland to operate their own locomotive and coaches over the

Highland Railway north of Inverness eventually ceased on nationalisation, and locomotive and coaches were put up for sale. The locomotive was the 0-4-4T Dunrobin already mentioned; the coaches were two, a bogie saloon built at the Wolverton works of the London & North Western Railway in 1899 and so splendid that it became a prototype for the royal train, and a four-wheeled saloon of 1909 customarily coupled behind the bogie saloon to steady it. The bogie saloon eventually reached the National Railway Museum and remains in it. The locomotive and the small saloon passed into the ownership of Capt. J. E. P. Howey, who also owned the 15 in. gauge Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway in Kent. They went south, the locomotive under her own steam for much of the way, and were exhibited at New Romney until 1965 when, after Capt. Howey had died, they were put up for sale again. The new owner shipped them to Canada, and for many years they have been at Fort Steele Heritage Town, British Columbia.

When Highland Railway 4-4-0 Ben Alder, the last HR main-line passenger locomotive, was withdrawn in 1953 she was not scrapped but placed in store, being shunted around the system from one locomotive shed to another over the next few years. There was at least one plausible rumour of permanent preservation, but this sadly proved false: although she was still extant as late as 1965, she was subsequently cut up.