On the 15th December 2018, the 34052 Lord Dowding headed for Chester on a Pathfinder Tours railtour.
George Jones captured these excellent images of the train arriving into Chester Platform 4 in some awful weather.
It then reversed out into the sidings to await its departure.
The arrival of the train was bang on time, with the departure to the sidings also bang on time.
DB Class 67 No.67018 was also tucked in behind the steam locomotive.
Thanks to George Jones once again for capturing these images.
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Responses
I so agree these images look like a token old relic being marshalled by a wonderful new motive unit. Add to this the ‘what is powering this train’ factor and you will see a few enthusiasts voting with their wallets. How sad. No one wants to see dead engines being pushed around an absolute travesty.
Just to be clear. This is actually Braunton 34046 because Lord Dowding was scrapped. Great article but for the non-enthusiast it is best to be clear. Thanks.
Hope she returns back to true identity next year
It seems now to be mandatory that every single “STEAM” train is obliged to have a diesel either behind the tender, or at the rear of the train. ‘Reasons’ I’ve heard for this include during the dry, hot summer, the ‘fire risk’ factor – then it being added as ‘insurance’ against breakdown or poor performance of the steam loco, or to provide banking assistance on undulating routes, the majority of these cases being unnecessary, but part of the ‘nanny’ culture we now live in, with spotty know-nothing PC jobsworths running the railways now, to computer-accurate timings, to avoid at all costs, the loss of even the odd minute on service trains. With this apparent striving for ‘atomic’ accuracy on timings, couldn’t the ‘planners’ get their own house in order – some regions’ timetables are a shambles, whilst others are virtually non-existent. As far as I can recall from my young days in the steam era (w-a-y before Beeching and all that), the railways promised nothing and the public had little in the way of expectations other than that A train would come along sooner or later (okay, maybe it was occasionally the latter), but with no complicated electric wiring and complex electronic signalling to deal with, problems tended to be local and fairly quickly remedied, not blanking out great chunks of the region as they do today. Alas a reversion to steam power is an impossible thought, but it is a fond memory, esp of how things worked so well WITHOUT the additional imposition of a smelly, carcinogenic polluting diesel on the train.