'Standard' 4MT

I guess in Britain we must have pretty well invented the 'preserved railway'. I wonder which the first actually was - perhaps the one of the Welsh narrow gauge lines, the Ffestiniog or the Talyllyn line. In terms of 'standard gauge' the two earliest were, I think, the Bluebell Railway in Sussex and this line in Yorkshire - the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.

This kind of operation is run by enthusiastic members. Now we have dozens, probably hundreds, of preservation societies around the country. Their tracks are still usually the haunt of steam locomotives young and old.

And this one is young - a British Railways 4MT 'Standard' tank locomotive designed by Robert Riddles and built at Brighton in 1951. For some extraordinary reason in Britain after the war we set about building hundreds of new national standard steam locomotives at a time when many countries were already scapping them.

These 4MT ('mixed traffic') engines were very nippy and were mainly used on suburban trains. It's a pretty design don't you think? But sadly most were scrapped after not much more than a decade of service. A waste eh?