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Even more of a co-incidence is the date of my post regarding 46202 - 74 years to the day.

It took quite some time to recover. They had to build a Bailey bridge in Water Lane, then they had to build the temporary road, bring in and build up the cranes (Sparrows supplied the cranes), lift the loco, detach the bogies and then put it on a trailer. The unusual road move had to be...

George Stephenson College, built on stilts because Water Lane used to flood regularly. When Watford Borough Council (much later) declined to approve the Hotel in Water Lane because it was a flood plain, a Government Planning Inspector approved it on appeal. Just before it opened it flooded and...

87007 didn’t end up down the embankment - you are confusing it with 86209, which did in 1975. 87007 wasn’t even derailed. A temporary road was built across the water meadow to recover 86209, which was taken on a trailer from Water Lane, round the infamous Watford one way system the wrong way...

Lumo Rochdale and Avanti (1 Blackpool return and 1 Chester, iirc) will also feature in the announcement.

0700 tomorrow morning is when it will be announced.

Correct. They are taking them back in strict CTED order, at a rate of 4 a year, approximately three months apart. The CTED dates for Avanti and EMR are identical so it was always a toss up as to who went in March and who went in June/July 2027. Now we know.

The SR standard 3MT tanks (82010-9/22-5) also the made the same move at the same time, although 82010-9 were the only ones that WR actually overhauled. Incidentally, WR then became responsible for their Britannia Pacifics and slowly took over this work from Crewe in 1956/7. To illustrate my...

The real value for HAL is what it can charge airlines for the Airport RAB, which the main fixed assets sit under. The train operation is effectively bunce. The interesting point about the 2025 accounts is that HAL extracted over £100m out of the business. It now has assets of less than £30m. It...

Eastleigh was dealing with various Standards and Fairburn 2-6-4T tanks in 1954/5. Swindon didn’t have capacity issues either. The reallocation was all about balancing workloads at a time when the total of needed steam overhauls all over the BR system was starting to decrease. The Standards and...

Swindon were responsible for the maintenance on the SR fleet (41290-41319) up until late 1956. The WR fleet were still dealt with at Crewe during this period.

52322, restored at Horwich as L&Y 1122 (not it’s real L&Y number).

Yes, because GBR Anglia does not exist yet. It is still only DfTO TOCs and NR working together.

Yes, 08556, used for work with the steam excursion sets. It was painted in green livery. The class 08 at KX in Sectorisation days is interesting. The passenger station pilot in the 1970’s and 1980’s (“1 shunt”) was a cl.31 usually kept in the milk dock. It was swapped over on a daily basis.

The Gresley buffet was in teak. Going back to the Green MK 1 SR coaches transferred away, quite a few Green CK’s found their way north. All the Bulleid SO’s were repainted in Maroon by Eastleigh before they were sent north.

And the 175’s could have gone to other TOCs but “the music stopped and GWR didn’t have a chair!” Nobody else wanted anything to do with them. The DfT choosing to withdraw the GWR HST’s forced the issue as to where they were going to end up. But the DfT weren’t going to keep them going at their...

Looks like it has slipped to the autumn.

I think the toilet issue is now well in the past - you don’t need to bring your own Elsan!

No chance. October next year is the target date for getting GBR going properly, after being legally set up a few months before, probably March/April. “Access Day”, when the new access and timetable planning arrangements are to be introduced, is currently scheduled for December 2027.

This is turning into a Monty Python sketch. I have been involved in recovering wheeled equipment from the tracks at KX, in the good old days when H&S never came into it. The odd station barrow, the odd brute, a few self help luggage trolleys (usually thrown over deliberately) no problem in...