Branching Out The Golden Age of Steam Railways

For more than 100 years,

steam engines drove Britain.

But in the 1950s, the government planned to modernise the railways,

scrap steam and close thousands of miles of track.

Most people embraced it as progress,

but a few resisted the changes.

They made plans to open branch lines and bring back steam.

Some even filmed their efforts.

Their home movies tell the story

of how they set about recreating this lost world

and how their commitment helped millions of people

to reconnect to a past that most thought had gone for ever.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLASTS

The hair stands up on the back of your neck.

It is absolutely wonderful.

It is a living being,

a whole thing bursting to life with tremendous power.

Every schoolboy's wish - "I've got to get onto an engine."

# Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas

# Let your heart be light... #

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,

and welcome to the Severn Valley Railway.

Welcome to our Santa Special weekend.

It's the week before Christmas

on a small railway that runs through Worcestershire and Shropshire -

the Severn Valley Railway.

There are hundreds of volunteers on duty.

Our next departure this afternoon will be the 12:45...

the 1:15 service to Santa's Grotto.

You hungry?

Paul Fathers is one of those volunteers.

During the week, he works in the security industry.

How do you like your bacon done? My wife likes it really burnt,

but she's not here.

Probably still in bed, if she's got any sense.

Thousands of enthusiasts like Paul

built the station and the platform he's walking along.

They restored the coaches he's passing.

They even rescued and restored 2857,

the steam locomotive he's about to drive.

WHISTLE PEEPS

'I started back in 1967, as a very young schoolboy.

'The railway was in its infancy. We had no locomotives, no coaches

'so I started helping out and then just stayed with it, really.'

WHISTLE BLASTS

When Paul first got involved, there were just a handful of volunteers,

but over the decades, railway preservation has blossomed.

Today, there are more than 250 steam engines

running on preserved lines right across the country.

WHISTLE BLASTS

What captured the imagination of a handful of people like Paul

was a love of the way railways in Britain used to be.

But from the early 1950s, things changed.

A newly-nationalised British Railways Board

planned to modernise the railways,

uprooting thousands of miles of branch lines

and ending the days of steam.

Well, in the 1950s, BR moves from a profit situation

to a loss situation.

And to a thumping loss situation.

And this is something rather new for the politicians,

cos up until that stage,

it's basically, "The railways run themselves

"and we don't really need to worry that much about them,

"apart from times of national crisis, like wars."

Now they've got to do something about it,

because it's costing the Exchequer money

at a time when we haven't got much money.

The railways go from profit to loss in the '50s,

really because you start the great car economy.

People start buying their first Austin 7 or whatever,

or their first motorbike.

The trunk roads, which were built in the 1930s, start to fill up

and they start being developed more

and at the end of the 1950s,

you start the motorway building programme

and the whole thing rolls on from then.

British Railways responded to this financial crisis

by weeding out unprofitable branch lines.

In the 1950s,

3,000 miles, out of a 20,000-mile network, were lost.

A few people resisted these closures

and two places - the Worth Valley in West Yorkshire

and the Severn Valley in Shropshire and Worcestershire -

were the vanguard of a movement

that was to spread across the whole country.

They say, "Well, actually, we think people still want this service

"and it's a public good. We ought to have the service,

"so if you're not going to run it, we will."

And that's just what happened

in 1963, in Bridgnorth in Shropshire,

on the Severn Valley Railway.

What you see with the station name board

is a group of us putting it back in its rightful place,

where it should stand on the platform.

That was, if you like, reclaiming the railway for us.

When you think,

just a few humble railway enthusiasts

could stop something like that, BR,

from cutting the track up,

that was marvellous, you know. It was fantastic, wasn't it?

That's Keith in the brown coat

in a home movie shot by one of the enthusiasts.

He was 26 at the time.

Like lots of people, you don't take a great deal of notice of things

or do anything, but I felt,

at this stage, with railways,

that it was my hobby, my love,

and that something had to be done.

What he did was write to his local paper.

A meeting followed that came up with the astonishing idea

of buying and running the railway themselves.

They formed a committee

and another 20-something, from Bewdley, became treasurer.

'We were called bunches of nutters. We were stupid.'

They didn't have anoraks in those days, by the way.

That was before the days of anoraks.

But the big key was to save the railway,

to save our local branch lines,

and they were being cut at such a rate

and they are the veins of the country - and were.

Keith and Columb weren't quite alone

in their resistance to British Rail's closure programme.

Further north, in West Yorkshire,

a few of the locals were campaigning

to keep open a branch line in the Worth Valley.

I do remember one of the local mill owners saying,

"I don't care what you're going to run on the line,

"I don't care about the locomotives or the rolling stock,

"I want to know, will there still be a 7:15 train

"for my workers to get to t'mill?"

Graham Mitchell was a teenager in Oakworth,

a village in the Worth Valley,

when, in 1961, British Rail said it would close the line.

I remembered on this platform,

you know, boxes of day-old chicks being loaded.

It was of that, sort of, importance to the locality, and the fact that

it was the local people who first banded together to save it,

because the locals wanted the transport link.

The railway had been here since the 1860s,

doing the job it was built to do,

moving people and goods up and down the valley.

And people wanted it still to do that.

Graham, along with other locals,

began a campaign to keep the branch line open.

It was led by a college lecturer, Bob Cryer.

This is a photograph taken in the spring of '63,

when I was engaged to Bob,

and he was the Parliamentary candidate

for Darwen

and I was a town councillor.

It's quite a nice photograph of him making a speech

and myself looking admiringly on.

They met in 1961, at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool.

For two nights during the week, they would have a dance

and at this dance, this young man came and asked me to dance with him.

Tall, quite good-looking young man,

and told me all about his ambition to preserve a railway,

which I thought was slightly bonkers.

But I thought, well, other than that, he seemed to be all right!

'Bob was a very much larger-than-life character.'

I was, at that time... I know I'm not now, but at that time,

I was a fairly, sort of, subdued person.

I was very impressed by him, but possibly more impressed by his car -

two-tone green, colour of your jumper -

a two-tone green Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire.

And whatever he did, he did it to the nth degree.

People either thought he was absolutely wonderful

or he got right up their nose.

The noses he really got up belonged to the British Rail executives,

who refused to keep the branch line open.

So the campaign he led switched tack

to raise money, buy the line and run it themselves.

While negotiations with British Rail dragged on,

volunteers worked at weekends to save what was left of the track.

David Kay was one of the founding members.

'When negotiations got a bit further on,'

they said we could maintain the track and run works trains.

Well, the track was in disgusting condition.

It had been run down for years.

Its main crop was pussy willows.

At Damems, you couldn't see the track

and they have hellish roots, these pussy willows.

To help tackle the pussy willow problem,

volunteers came from across the North of England.

As well as his scythe, Brian Baker brought his film camera.

What you're seeing there is

our desire to see the track

back to what it should be - nice and neat, weed-free,

the cesses, the sides of the track, all neat and tidy.

Like many of the volunteers,

Brian had a history of involvement with steam railways.

My father was a station master in Ireland, on the West Cork railways,

and I've always been a railway nut.

I think it runs in my blood. It's just one of those things.

I was never afraid of manual labour.

I thoroughly enjoyed what we did at the railway.

I mean, you did it at home, digging gardens and things,

doing fences, laying footpaths and so on,

but there was a totally different feel about working on a railway

and when you did it, you felt you'd achieved something.

Volunteers in the Worth Valley

weren't the only ones weeding out unwanted growth.

In the aftermath of the 1963 Beeching Report,

British Rail was pruning ever more branches.

Groups up and down the country

responded with plans to save their local line.

For the volunteers in Bridgnorth on the Severn Valley line,

rescuing the track was arduous and heavy work,

but in 1966,

they got a tremendous boost.

They found an old works trolley.

You'd go along, we'd use our feet, like this, on the sleepers.

Highly dangerous. We recovered bits and pieces,

brought them up from further down the railway, back up to Bridgnorth,

and, you know, we thought that was a big thing.

We'd actually got something to go up and down with!

We even rescued some little ground signals.

We pushed this trolley five miles

a couple or three times on a Sunday,

and so, it was a respite to jump on the thing

and come whizzing down the bank into the station.

The volunteers worked every weekend for two years.

They ran open days to raise the deposit they would need

to buy just five miles of track from British Rail.

We got a lot of sleepers that were lying about in the station yard

and put these on bricks

and this little steam engine went up and down along the platform,

charging fivepence a ride or something like that.

All to raise the £2,500 deposit

to give to BR, so we could be sure that we'd got the railway line.

And a lot of publicity was produced to show what our idea was.

And in due course,

we started getting one or two railwaymen interested.

And they, of course,

and their knowledge, was exactly what we wanted.

A steam engine driver, John Hill, joined in 1966,

but there was no engine for him to drive.

'All the time we were putting in, it could have gone to waste.

We certainly didn't know

whether we were going to get any steam engine or not.

We didn't even... We had to find a tremendous sum of money

to buy the five miles of line from Bridgnorth to Hampton Loade

and we didn't even know whether we'd be able to succeed in doing that,

so it was just an act of faith on everybody's part.

Help would come from a most unexpected quarter.

British Railways were in the middle of a modernisation programme,

replacing all their steam engines with diesel and electric trains.

SIGNAL BELL RINGS

You end up with

lines and lines of locomotives

parked up in scrapyards, being cut, right through the 1960s.

Locomotives that used to be the king of the road,

used to be the thing that really pulled the premier expresses...

..looking rather shabby, taken to the scrapyard and sliced into bits

to feed the motor industry.

British Rail's decision to scrap so many steam engines

was, ironically, just the boost the Severn Valley volunteers needed.

They sold some of their redundant locomotives to steam enthusiasts.

A Great Western engine, 3205,

was bought by a group who then offered it to the Severn Valley,

providing the society could raise the £2,500 deposit

and buy the five miles of line.

It took them three years

to raise what seems today such a trifling amount.

But on Easter Saturday, March 1967,

3205 arrived at Bridgnorth.

After four years' absence, steam had returned to the Severn Valley.

We just didn't believe it!

It was there, a real live steam engine.

A whole station jammed with people of all ages,

who'd come to see this engine arrive.

The enthusiasm was just absolutely tremendous.

It was absolutely incredible. It was a marvellous day.

The driver on that day was John Hill.

I was quite a dashing young blade in those days.

I didn't ever get round to going to a cinema and slashing the seats,

but it was that sort of era.

I had a huge Brylcreem quiff,

which I look back on now as, I looked like some kind of idiot.

But that was all the rage at the time.

Nobody was absolutely certain that this day was ever going to come

and here it was.

Not only an engine, but we brought four coaches with it, as well.

We did all kinds of weird and wonderful things,

which we weren't supposed to do -

giving people rides in and out of the station.

It was euphoria gone mad, I suppose.

WHISTLE BLASTS

For Columb Howell, the arrival of that first engine

was a boyhood dream come true.

He could finally learn how to drive a steam engine.

I loved it. A steam engine is a very live thing.

You've got the heart of the engine, which, of course, is the fire.

You've got the blood, which is the steam.

And that steam is transferred

by the reciprocation of the valves to the pistons,

and the pistons then push and push the rods, then onto the rail,

and there was this terrific exhilaration

when you're driving a steam engine,

of the thing working up its speed and all that sort of thing.

The fire going absolutely white hot and watching the gauges to make sure

that you've got the correct steam pressure, the water pressure.

And it isn't just shovelling coal into a hole.

You've got to put it where the coal's wanted,

and this is where the skill comes in.

When you feel the engine move for the first time

as a result of your effort,

it is absolutely wonderful.

John Hill was very sympathetic to us amateurs,

and I would never, ever claim to be a professional driver.

When you see the professional do it,

you think, "God, I wish I could do it like that!"

Any hope that was flagging,

any enthusiasm that had started to flag was immediately boosted,

and so Severn Valley Railway was underway.

We were going places.

Columb Howell and John Hill weren't the only ones

enjoying the experience of steam.

British Rail's policy of moving to diesel and electric power

was giving people up and down the country

the chance to buy their very own steam locomotive.

Where I lived as a youngster, when you went to bed at night,

you were never without the sound of a train going by.

WHISTLE BLASTS

Richard Greenwood lived close to the Worth Valley Railway

in West Yorkshire.

He and some friends were keen to buy a small engine.

One of our favourite engines was the pug engine.

They were so typical of where we lived.

It was part of our heritage, really,

even though at that stage, we were only in our twenties.

Any small engine is called a pug engine.

Most railways that served industrial areas had a fleet of these,

because they used them in docks,

where they could go round right-angle bends between one dock and the other.

And I remember them very well, from seeing them shunting,

a low-level shunting yard in Salford,

and to get from one yard to the other yard,

they had to cross the street, and every time they had to do this,

a man came out with a red flag, stood in the middle of the road like that,

and held the traffic up while the engine went across.

Oh, there was a band of us around that time,

probably about 12 or 18,

who were dead keen, so we decided

we'd do what we could to buy a pug engine.

Started printing photographs and selling them to people,

having stalls at exhibitions and selling this, that and the other.

'Bit by bit, we raised a bit of money

'and bit by bit, we had enough

'to buy this engine and to transport it.'

By 1964, they'd raised the money -

£450.

To move it, Pickfords charged £80.

It came on a low loader, all the way from Neath in South Wales

and when, on the morning, they started to unload it,

unfortunately, the wheels missed the rails

and the crew, obviously, used to this sort of thing,

they used jacks to jack it up and throw it over onto the tracks.

Then they went away with the Pickfords Scammell Tractor. Job done.

The problem for Richard and his friends

was that they had nowhere to put the engine.

So you go out and you buy a steam locomotive,

relatively cheaply by present-day standards,

and then the wife says, "You're not keeping that in the back garden."

So what do you do with it?

Initially, they have permission to run them on the state network.

They can run rail tours with them

and they may get a place in a shed to park them and so on.

However, BR decides

they don't want any locomotives they don't own running on the network.

In 1968, when they run their last steam locomotive,

they also ban all other steam engines from running on the network.

And this is great for the start of the preserved lines,

because they basically, suddenly,

have the monopoly to be able to run steam engines.

If you owned a big steam engine or even a small one,

you've got no choice. You've got to go to one of those nascent schemes

that are just starting out

and say, "Do you mind if I bring my loco to your railway?"

And of course, the railways themselves are short of power.

They're run by enthusiasts and the first thing they'll say is "Yes".

In Rochdale, Richard Greenwood needed a home for the pug

and the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway

was the obvious - indeed, the only - realistic home for it.

We approached the offices of the railway here.

You know, "If we buy one of these engines, can we bring it?"

And they said, "Yes!"

Simple as that, you know, on the basis, really, of a telephone call.

No agreements, nothing written. Nothing like that, at all.

There were people here working to reopen a railway.

There were people coming in from left field with rolling stock.

Each group needed the other and so it was a happy marriage.

The locals realised that the railway meant something,

and the appearance of a steam engine in the yard, of course,

began to convince the locals that something was going to happen here.

British Railways gave permission to run a weekly works train

to go out with wagons and tools

and start clearing the drains, putting the fences in order,

relaying bits of bad track and things like that.

This engine was ideal for that

because it was quite small and it didn't burn much coal

and it didn't cost very much to run.

And it made money, too -

£50 for this advert featuring Ronnie Corbett.

The railway was very important

to commercial organisations,

such as the advertising company,

because they had the railway to themselves for the day,

if that's how they wanted it, and money changed hands,

but what we were after, of course, was maximum publicity.

Ronnie Corbett, I got my own little bits of film of him on the day.

You know, there he is - the bit of film I've got of him,

he's doing his wardrobe, on Ingrow platform, doing up his fly.

He really was a character.

The effect they wanted was for the viewer to think

that poor Ronnie Corbett, you know,

had been plastered on the front of this locomotive

coming towards you, the viewer,

when, of course he hadn't. He'd been filmed going backwards.

The poor cameraman had to trust the driver

that he would go backwards and not come forwards.

You know, Ronnie Corbett has got the secret of the Symbol Biscuits

and there he is, in a tunnel, trying to tell everybody about it.

I know how Symbol bake those delicious chocolate chips

into Maryland cookies. The secret is...

TRAIN WHISTLE BLASTS

Aaargh!

I know the Symbol secret!

I know the Symbol secret! I know the Symbol secret!

All the effort made by the little pug

and the West Yorkshire volunteers paid dividends

when the Worth Valley Railway reopened in 1968,

six years after British Rail had first closed the line.

Two years later, it was the turn of the Severn Valley Railway

and, by 1970, there were 18 steam railway preservation groups

across the country.

Just as hundreds of branch lines were closing

and steam had gone forever from the mainline,

the preservation movement was gaining momentum.

Then, in the summer of 1970,

there was a film set in the Worth Valley

that would take railway preservation to new and undreamed-of heights.

Graham Mitchell landed a part.

This is actually the spot where I stood to flag off the train

in several sequences in the 1970 film.

-Can you remember what you said?

-Yes. Bernard Cribbins said to me...

And away, Mr Mitchell! And give it to Bert!

'I was slightly overenthusiastic with the flag. Only slightly.'

The film was Lionel Jeffries' box-office sensation,

The Railway Children.

'The railway was being used for six weeks.'

It had to provide a lot of volunteers over that period

and the appeal went out to the qualified volunteers,

to say we actually need guards and firemen and drivers.

'I was teaching in Dudley.

'It was a week's half-term and I came up here for a week's holiday.

'And I said, I'll work every day as a guard.'

ENGINE TOOTING

As well as needing the society's volunteers,

the film needed its locomotives.

This one, 957, featured heavily.

It doesn't look like it today,

but this was the Green Dragon in The Railway Children film.

'For The Railway Children, it was required to be green,

'to fulfil the name of The Green Dragon.'

'I think it looks wonderful, but sometimes

'people are disappointed that it doesn't look like The Green Dragon.

All the volunteers, rolling stock and engines

were organised by the railway's chairman, Bob Cryer.

And he even found time to shoot this behind-the-scenes home movie.

'He got a credit for it,'

which he thought was just absolutely bliss,

'to have a credit for a feature film.'

'After my week of filming, I went back to Dudley'

on the Sunday night and I was back in the classroom on Monday morning.

And on Monday evening, I got a phone call from the assistant director

saying, "We want you on set again tomorrow, Tuesday morning."

I said, "No, I'm back in the classroom, I'm sorry."

And it happened to be the day when they were filming Daddy coming back.

Anne's husband Bob stepped in.

'There is a vague figure, which is Bob in Graham's outfit,

'and, at that point, Bernard Cribbins says,

"Right away, Mr Cryer!"'

Right away, Mr Cryer!

'It was great with that, because otherwise,'

he would've had his credit at the beginning,

but he wouldn't have had a part in it.

Bob Cryer died in a car accident in 1994.

'What he wanted, more than anything,

'was that those people who did the work made the decisions.

'In essence, it was a sort of socialist democratic experiment.'

And it works to this day.

Don't you think it's extraordinary, David, that here we are,

as two elderly gentlemen now and it's 42 years

since this film was made...

-and we're still here and part of it?

-Yes.

But an old chap in the village said to me,

"You know, what's really important about that film -

"there's no drugs in it, no sex, no folk around with no clothes on.

-"It's just a nice morality story for the family."

-Yes.

And it all works out.

And it's amazing when you consider how much the producer swore.

No, we're going to cut that bit, David.

'It is said that Lionel Jeffries' daughter read the book

'and said, "Daddy, you really must make a film of this."

'Lionel came up here and saw the railway

'and was convinced this was the place.

'The wonderful thing, from the point of view of promotion of the railway,

'is that he kept Oakworth as the name of the station.'

BELL RINGING

'Whereas in the book, it's called Meden Vale.'

He retained it for the film and it did us wonders.

MUSIC

'After the film was released,

'there was a flock of new visitors to the railway.'

Because the film has been shown so often on television

and because Barry Norman says it's the finest British film

ever made for children in this country,

it's got an enduring attraction,

which continues to bring people here, time after time and year after year.

MUSIC CONTINUES

The impact on the Worth Valley was phenomenal.

That caused us a great problem, The Railway Children.

All of a sudden, we were carrying about 60,000 passengers.

And we didn't know whether,

you know, shall we lock it up and run away?

'We carried 4,000-odd passengers in a day on one train,'

so it was decided then to put the loop in.

This model demonstrates the principle.

The loop on the right is the short section of line on a single track

that allows trains to pass each other.

Once we had The Railway Children film,

there was such an increase in traffic we realised straightaway

we needed to run more trains. And the way to do that was

'to split the line in two and have a place for trains to pass, which is

'why we built this loop line at the side of the main line here,

'so we could have a train in each section

'and they can cross each other. That gives you twice as many trains.'

'My grandfather worked on the railways.

'I'd always been fascinated by the idea

'of how you control traffic and control trains.'

Bruce became a volunteer on the railway in his teens.

He and his mates installed a loop in time

for the influx of visitors in 1971.

'The loop had to be controlled, somehow.

'Originally, we just had some levers at each end

'and a person on the ground signalled the trains by hand.

'But that wasn't suitable for a permanent arrangement,

'so we had to find a signal box and put proper signalling in'

and that's where the signal box behind came in.

How they got the box was typical of the determination of the volunteers.

Bruce found it near Bradford and he contacted British Rail.

'And they were willing to sell it'

and so I bought, the actual building, I bought,

because by then I was an employee on what was called a firewood order,

which was a note originally intended purely for buying firewood,

so that's a piece of firewood, officially.

Once it was paid for,

all they had to do was bring it to the railway and make it work.

'We set about thinking about how to move it

'and rather than try and take it apart and risk damaging it,

'we thought it would be practical to move it in one piece.

'So I contacted a crane hire firm

'and they agreed that they could do the lift.'

'And that's how it came along the road all the way from Bradford,

'to Oakworth further up the line and we brought it down on a train'

to its present position on this loop line and it was then

'taken off on rollers onto a pile of sleepers above the foundations,

'which were then jacked down and the box was put down on its base.

It's an interesting way of doing it. Others have done it since,

but I think we can claim a first for moving a signal box in one piece.

While the loop was a great success, The Railway Children was to have

an effect on preservation well beyond the Worth Valley.

The film captured a seemingly-lost world of steam,

a world for which the British public held a particular affection.

It was a nostalgia that the preservation societies

were quick to exploit.

Some of these preserved railways,

which have got really quite clever marketing teams,

start to think about this and think, "What are we selling here?

"We're selling a kind of symbol of the past."

'The best of the preserved railways recreate this past

'on their own stations.

'You'll be surrounded by enamel signs'

and often staff in wool, sort of jacket uniforms,

sometimes with a flower in their buttonhole

looking exactly like you might have looked

were the Royal train passing through your station in about 1950.

'You'll see the original tap'

and the stop tap cover still originally there,

that was not new put in, that was still there when we built it,

saying GWR, W for water.

Volunteers began to fashion this world of the railway

from a bygone era in minute detail.

This is Malcolm Broadhurst at Bewdley station

on the Severn Valley Railway.

'It's only a gents' urinal,

'but it is superb and it's recreating what was here.'

If we're going to try and bring the railway back to as it was,

you want to try and get it looking as it was.

'The restoration of the loo

'was just a part of the big jigsaw of the railway, really.'

When you look at the effort that was required to

restore the line and the station and the rolling stock.

It might have been just a loo,

but volunteer Phil Cheesewright thought it was worth filming.

At that time, I was filming trains along the line and other things.

It just happened this was a project

that happened to be going on at the time, purely accidentally.

They discovered the loo more than 250 miles away

on a platform at Melrose Station in Scotland.

'When we got there, we took the gutter off, that was easy peasy,

'came off, cut it down'

and then I think we tried sliding these up, and a bit of hammering,

not too heavy and of course it wouldn't dismantle and we thought,

oh, my God, what are we going to do?

A blowtorch came in handy,

then came the logistical nightmare of getting it home.

'Luckily as we would have it, where it was situated,'

there was a platform edge next door

and we were able to just back the truck up to the platform edge

and all we did then was lower the sections down onto the platform

and just slid them in.

'I think we regarded ourselves as adventurers, pioneers.'

We didn't fund it from ticket sales, we funded it ourselves,

'we put our hands in our pockets

'and raised the cash we needed to take the project on.'

One of the volunteers who helped rebuild it

is the driver of the Santa Special, Paul Fathers.

The reason I became involved is there wasn't a lot going on.

Nothing on a Sunday, apart from church,

and of course I was in the choir and did my bit,

but there was nothing much going on,

so being able to come here and help to restore the railway

seemed a very sensible thing to do.

MUSIC: "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees

Did I see you in red flares then, Paul?

-Quite possibly, yes. Fashionable at the time.

-Yes.

-As was the haircut.

-Yes.

Paul was young and a heart-throb in those days.

We can see him in his John Travolta phase later on in the film.

# Night fever, night fever

# We know how to do it

# Night fever, night fever

# We know how to show it. #

Then we invited the Mayor of Bewdley to open it,

who congratulated us on providing Bewdley with the first urinal

on this side of the river.

# Borne on the wind

# Making it mine... #

'I like the mat idea,'

to wipe your feet before you went in to the toilet.

# ..night fever

# We know how to do it. #

'We wanted to recreate the railway as it would've been,

'probably in the 1930s, 1940s, probably up to the 1950s.'

So when people take the ride on the steam train,

they get to look at railway stations

as they were, probably, in their heyday.

By the time the urinal opened in 1975,

preservation societies were growing very quickly.

They were all recreating a sense of the past with steam at its heart,

but they faced a big problem.

Now that British Rail had scrapped all its engines,

where would they find the locomotives they needed

to cope with a huge public appetite for steam?

They would find engines in the most unlikely of places,

in a scrap yard in South Wales.

It's where in 1971, a group of volunteers from the Severn Valley

found this Great Western locomotive, number 2857.

They raised the money, bought the engine,

towed it back to the Severn Valley

and have been working on it off and on ever since.

I'm just having a struggle with this one screw here,

which I think has got to be a longer one.

I've got it the wrong way round...

THEY TALK OVER EACH OTHER

Yes. Sorry about that, H.

I'm going to talk to you.

-Yeah. Well, I'm trying not to breathe in.

-Oh, right, OK. Fair enough.

For my health, it's very fine dust,

it's the same as loft insulation

and it can damage your lungs if you're not careful.

One of the reasons why I got involved,

I could see all the other engines being preserved

were express engines with names

and I can remember these because I lived in Wolverhampton,

next to the main line and I can remember these trundling up and down,

day in, day out, and I didn't think anybody was going to bother

rescuing one of these, so that's why I got involved.

-You've not got a tape measure on you, have you?

-No.

-It's about like that.

-Is it?

-Yes.

-Great, I'll...

The man looking for the tape measure is Steve Whittaker.

Steve took over the role of engineering team leader in 1980.

But his interest in steam engines goes back much further.

When I was three,

my dad drew a train after tea one day

and it was really good and lifelike

and the next time the pencil and drawing paper came out,

before he even picked the pencil up it was, "Dad,

"will you draw me a train?"

It just somehow gets in your blood, it's an infectious hobby.

He would need all his enthusiasm and lots of know-how to restore 2857.

The job would be massive.

'Organising all the missing parts,'

that had been taken off the engine, which is very difficult and complex,

drawings required, patterns to make castings, machining,

and all stuff that the average,

even railway enthusiast is not familiar with these parts.

So, a great deal to learn.

2857 was just one of more than 200 steam engines rusting away

in the Barry scrap yard.

'I can remember going down to Barry scrap yard and...'

looking at it and I felt, you're wasting your time here.

It was an absolute load of just scrap and nothing else.

'It was in poor condition,'

having been left out in the open for many years,

but compared with many of the engines in the scrap yard,

this one was actually fairly complete.

The scrap yard in Barry has a special place

in the history of steam preservation in Britain.

It was one of many hired by British Rail

to cut up thousands of redundant steam locomotives.

All the other scrap yards got on with the job,

but in Barry, the owner, Dai Woodham,

hadn't got round to doing it.

Preservation societies like the Severn Valley

headed for South Wales.

Columb Howell joined the party.

'I used to do it in two hours from here.

'We used to go down, a group of us, which was great fun, go to Wales,'

it was always lovely weather down there at Barry.

Lovely. In the sun we used to go to Barry Island and have our chips,

go round on the big dipper and everything, just good fun.

'And of course you used to fool about getting your overalls on,

'pushing people over and that sort of thing.'

Oh, it was great fun.

The atmosphere at Barry was very special,

because there were other railways, Keighley and Worth Valley,

Dart Valley, Bluebell, and other railways coming up,

all wanting to preserve another engine for another...

You looked at each other and said,

"I hope you're not going to touch my engine..."

So you'd mark it up for preservation.

'But we often pooled our work

'so we could help each other to get our engines ready,

'so we all set to on the 28's bearings.'

There's three of us sitting down there, like milking a cow, basically.

We're working away with this emery cloth.

You had to do it like this.

One started, then the next one, and the next one,

and it was all part of... it was just such fun.

'It was a long uphill struggle,'

rescuing the parts that all the other scrap men and enthusiasts

and collectors were ravaging, trying to get everything

that was valuable off the engine before it went missing.

'And what about the chap who sold it to you?

'Dai Woodham. Well, very interesting character.

'We were all very thankful to him, because having bought 236 locos,

'he then continued cutting up steel coal wagons for several years

'and all the engines were just left languishing in the yard,

'which was great for preservationists.'

'He doesn't cut them up because he doesn't need to.

'He's at the bottom end of the Welsh valleys'

and they're getting rid of the little coal wagons

and they're much easier to cut up than a steam locomotive,

which is quite complicated,

so he doesn't bother to cut them up. He leaves them to one side.

It's kind of like his nest egg for when he retires.

Dai Woodham died in 1994.

His sons, Paul and John, grew up around the scrapyard.

All this would be big piles of scrap

and this was where everything took place, the main part,

all the cranes would be working, all the burners would be working.

These are photos of the wagon wheels, piles of them. Just shows

how many wagons that come through and I can remember the axles

stacked on either side of the lines where all the wagons were cut up.

We just kept cutting and cutting

and we didn't have time to cut up the steam engines.

'It was a playground for... older kids.

'My favourite game was to start at one end and see

'if I could get from one end to the other without getting off them.

'And I'd go up through the chimneys, across the top,'

down and from one engine to the other.

'As people realised they were here'

and more and more people came to visit,

then they realised these were the last

and somebody had obviously said to him, can we buy them off you? Yes.

And it just snowballed and snowballed

and in hindsight, they were lucky.

You go away to these preservation societies and you see something

that would never have been if it wasn't for him.

But nothing happened overnight.

It took four years of hard fundraising

before the group had raised the £5,700,

80,000 in today's prices, they needed to buy the engine.

Bob Kyte filmed the journey as it was towed to Bewdley.

'It arrived here August 13th in '75,

'we started replacing the copper pipes'

and making the gunmetal fittings that were missing

'and in 1979, we steamed it, just to see what it was like.'

And then we found out why British Rail had withdrawn it.

It was an absolute bag of nails...

HE LAUGHS

They discovered a crack n the cylinder block.

It was a disaster that could've ruined eight years' work

on their dream project.

But Steve scoured the country

and a year later found a replacement cylinder

in a South Wales steelworks.

Then four more years of hard graft started.

The whole locomotive was stripped

and rebuilt to mainline condition in the elements, out in the open.

It was even painted to completion out in the open...

at Bewdley.

Incredible. And here's the living proof.

Anyone feeling strong?

That's your end.

'The thing that's made 2857,

'an unpopular old goods engine as it is, a success,

'is the tremendous guys that we've got.

'A ramshackle team from all walks of life who work like Trojans.'

OK. Get down at this end.

Just a bit in the middle.

'If something wanted doing, you know, Steve would do it,

'or get somebody else to do it, which is the sort of chap that you want.

'I mean, I've done my fair share,

'but I think I've taken him as a lead, really.

'If it wasn't for him,

'we wouldn't have got anywhere, I don't think.'

'I wouldn't swap it for anything.

'You'll never get me to a football match.'

Too much rail engineering to be done.

Mission accomplished.

Harry.

Steve and Bob's story on the Severn Valley

could be replicated right across the country.

These days, all over Britain,

more than 200 restored steam locomotives

are running on more than 100 preserved railway lines

and they cover 500 miles of track.

The achievement of the preserved railway movement is to go

in a little over 60 years from nothing at all

to having hundreds of railways,

thousands of volunteers, hundreds of steam locomotives working

and millions of visitors, which means

they've become part of our day-to-day lives and that's a major achievement.

ENGINES WAIL

Steam preservation touched a nerve with the nation.

It helped us rediscover a history we thought we'd lost

and as well as being part of our heritage,

steam has become part of today's economy.

HE WHISTLES

Some societies have their own railway and carriage workshops.

They're even building steam engines from new.

HORNS TOOTING

But the backbone of the movement remains the thousands of volunteers

who continue to turn out day after day,

week after week to ensure that the trains run on time.

'They're even doing things like running Santa specials,'

so that if you're a child of four, these days,

you'd probably go to at least three preserved railways

in the course of your childhood,

because they'll take you on a Santa special.

And that's something that the railways invented and run

and it's a big part of their income

and it's probably one reason why you no longer go to a department store

to see Santa, because he's on a steam train, at a railway near you.

# So have yourself

# A merry little Christmas...

# Now... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd