Grey skies no match for BR black Beneath leaden skies, Dinmore Manor Ltd’s two locomotives, WR 4-6-0 No. 7820 Dinmore Manor piloted by GWR 2-8-0 No. 3850 visiting from the West Somerset Railway still managed to catch the early sunshine. MALCOLM RANIERI
Mixed weather may have dogged the May 24-26 spring bank holiday weekend, but could not deter the crowds from attending the eagerly awaited Back to Black-themed Cotswold Festival of Steam at the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway. Robin Jones was among around 3000 passengers who defied the forecasts to enjoy a superb day out on a magnificent line.
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here is no doubting that the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway gets better and better. I first saw Toddington station in the heritage era in 1983, when the initial lengths of track were being laid, and have followed its progress ever since. It appears that every time I visit, there is always something new to impress, like the state-of-the-art carriage works and paint shop at Winchcombe, which once in full operation will be the envy of almost every heritage railway in Britain, or the new GWR water tower at Toddington station,
now connected up to original steam-era pipework which lay for decades beneath the platforms. The G/WR is far from being a stranger to adversity. The two landslips which crippled the line in recent years, forcing it to be run in two halves, before a £1 million appeal launched by Pete Waterman helped pay for the repairs, now seem like a distant memory. This year saw the biggest and boldest gala in the line’s heritage-era history, the now-annual Cotswold Festival of Steam, sponsored by Heritage Railway and run this year on a ‘Back to Severn Valley Railway-based WR pannier No. 1501 approaching Hailes Abbey with a freight working on May 25. SIMON WALKER
Black theme’, bringing together as many locomotives in BR black as possible. The star of the show, the one everyone wanted to see, was WR 4-6-0 No. 7820 Dinmore Manor, recently reliveried into unlined black, the first member of the class to carry that livery since 1959. It has borrowed the tender from the Bluebell Railway’s GWR 4-4-0 Dukedog No. 9017 Earl of Berkeley until its own tender is ready next spring following restoration. Then there was GWR 4-6-0 No. 3850, also owned by Dinmore Manor Ltd, which headed some very long mixed freight trains, and which, in an impressive and welcome move by the railway, were allowed to carry passengers in the brake vans. From the Mid-Hants Railway came LMS ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0 No. 45379, historically appropriate as it was a sister locomotive that hauled the last steam train on the Stratfordupon-Avon to Cheltenham route in 1966. Another visitor was Hawksworth pannier tank No. 1501 from the Severn Valley Railway, resplendent as ever in its lined BR black livery. They were joined by home-based repatriated Turkish Stanier 8F in BR livery as No. 48274. However, BR black did not have it all its own way. One of the highlights of the event was the debut of Jeremy Hosking’s GWR heavy freight 2-8-0T No. 4270, which has been under restoration from Barry scrapyard condition for a decade at Toddington since he bought it from the now-defunct Swansea Vale Railway. The 1919-built locomotive, a member of the class designed for the heavy mineral traffic in South Wales, spent virtually all of its working life at Newport (Ebbw Junction) shed apart
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