Give thanks for the steam giants

1:32pm Wednesday 18th June 2008

A THANKSGIVING service for the steam locomotive is to be celebrated.

It is to commemorate the 40th anniversary since the end of mainline steam on British Railways.

The service will take place on Sunday, August 10, at 3pm in St Augustine's Church, Summers Street, Swindon.

And over the next few weeks in the lead-up to this service I will write about the ones that got away.

That is the steam locos that have steamed on from beyond the grave - like No 2807 that survived the cutting torch.

George Jackson Churchward, renowned for the City of Truro and Lode Star, had the vision and guts to build the ultimate freight locomotive.

It was introduced at the zenith of the Edwardian era and at a time when railway companies only wanted better and faster passenger locomotives.

Unperturbed by this Churchward, with typical obstinacy, conceived the Class 2800 a 2-8-0 behemoth of a locomotive.

The 2800 Class was solid and sturdy, with eight coupled driving wheels to give it maximum traction.

It also had an efficient firebox, which burnt coal in a white-hot cauldron but was easy for the fireman to feed.

There was no doubt it was the penultimate of British freight locos. My father was fond of working on a later sister to it, the Midland 8F loco, which was also built at Swindon during the Second World War for war work on the Midland Region.

The British Railways' 9F class, like the Evening Star, owed much to the loco designed and built by Churchward 50 years earlier.

Over a 30 year period 167 2-8-0s were built but this steadfast machine with modifications stayed true to its Churchward roots.

It was said you couldn't break it even when you pushed it to the limit and it always did everything that was expected of it.

Churchward had wanted the class to haul a minimum of 60 mineral or coal wagons in and out of coalmines, quarries and other industrial yards.

The curves in coalmines and industrial yards were notoriously tight, so he incorporated a novel design into the flanges on the centre wheels, differing them in thickness, with some sideways play on the wheel bearings, which enabled this monster loco to negotiate tight curves without derailing.

The loco performed better than expected and tests with 60 wagons were soon upped to a 107-wagon record-breaking haul of 2,012 tons from Swindon to Acton, in 1906.

The class then worked heavy coal trains - coal being paramount to the successful operation of the Dreadnought fleet.

Welsh coal best satisfied the insatiable boilers of the mighty battleships of the Royal Navy.

These were crucial to the safety of the realm at the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914, when 2800s, known as "Jellicoe Specials," were hauling thousands of tons of Welsh Coal around the clock destined for the Grand Fleet based at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands.

Number 2807 was one of these illustrious locos, but sadly, in 1963 after 1.5 million miles of hard slogging, it was withdrawn and sent to Barry Scrap yard.

Rusting away and overgrown with weeds, in 1981 2807 was pulled out of that graveyard, becoming the oldest locomotive to be saved from Barry.

Today it is at the Gloucester Warwickshire Railway undergoing refurbishment. It is hoped it will steam again in 2010, in time to celebrate its 103rd year.

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