Saturday 5 September 2009

Wear Valley Steam

On many occassions I have been asked what rolling stock will run on this route.

I've never really had an answer till now, I just kinda thought the 37/101 and maybe the 03 and 08.

However, the more I researched the more I want to make a few steam locos for this route, so going back through my refference material I picked out 3 locos that cropped up in almost every image.

The K4 - Great Marquess
J21 0-6-0
G5 0-4-4
I have gathered the plans and am in the process of gathering the ref images and info.
Here is the G5 I started late last night.



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1 comment:

Anna said...

I saw the same photos, so I can certainly concurr (I loved the colour shots of the K4 at Bishop, in particular).

The NER Q6 is the other big one from the steam era - I'd imagine they were every bit as common in the area as the G5s and J21s.

From what I can tell the J21s tended to work freights on the Weardale line and the Q6s on the Durham line. West Auckland shed also had a good complement of BR Standard steamers, so they wouldn't be at all out of place either.

During the early to mid 60s (prior to the arrival of 31s and 37s at Thornaby) green 24s, 25s and even 27s would have visited the Weardale line (with an even wider variety of main-line types on diversion from the ECML on some Sundays).

In the 80s period the class 31s were at least as common as the 37s (I used to live next to the line, and they seemed to be diagrammed interchangeably by Thornaby). The occasional 20 also turned up on engineers trains in later years.

On the shunter front I'd expect at least J72s from Darlington during the steam years. After they went class 04s were stationed at Shildon until the yards were run down.

There's certainly a lot of potential subjects to choose from... :)