Hobbler wrote:Yes its probably a fancifull idea that there were any survivors other than those which went into preservation but the fact remains that the MOD purchased a great many new locomotives that they didnt appear to need at that time and apart from 199 many of the rest of the batch remained in store for most of their existance . Quite possibly it was just over zealous procurement but if you look at history at that time with Eisenhower coming to power and US foreign policy becoming angled towards brinkmanship as far as nuclear war was concerned then you realise that the threat of nuclear war was very real so the MOD could have been planning to use these engines as some sort of reserve .
We will probably never know the true facts.
As you say, the truth will never be known for certain, but my bet is on over-zealous procurement. The MOD have been especially good at that over the years!
The Strategic Reserve story has been doing the rounds for years, of course, and no doubt promulgated by the same sort of people who think Elvis Presley is still alive. When you look at it from a logical point of view (which I hate doing but I've got this far into the post
), the practicalities wouldn't stack up:
1. In a country the size of the UK, what difference would a couple of dozen, or even a couple of hundred, steam locomotives make in the nation's transportation needs? Answer - virtually none.
2. Where would they be coaled, watered and serviced? If you ran, lets say, a freight from Box to London, it would need servicing at the other end. By the end of the 60s there were no facilities left.
3. Even well-maintained steam locomotives of that era tended to be on the unreliable side, minor faults and gremlins turning up quite frequently. It is true that it was usually more practical to limp an ailing steam engine home than it was a first-generation diesel, but if you had 600 tons behind a poor steaming 8F coming up Dauntsey bank, would it just be left there if it failed or what would come to rescue it?
4. We may well have had plentiful coal reserves in this country but, by the time of the end of steam in 1968, we also had natural gas coming ashore from the North Sea and oil would shortly follow. This alone would mean that there would be an adequate supply of fuel for diesel engines in a national emergency, so why go to the bother of retaining some steam engines when, as said at 2 above, there were no facilities left for them.
Picking up on Hobbler's point for a minute, Eisenhower was President between 1953 and 1961. There was no need then for a strategic reserve of steam locomotives because we had over 12,000 of the bloody things running on BR at the time!
By 1968, when the world was being run by Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, Charles de Gaullle and Leonid Brezhnev (put them in your own order of importance!), not only had things calmed down a bit since the Bay of Pigs incident, but we also had a few thousand diesel and electric locomotives roaming the rail system, with all servicing, maintenance and repair facilities in place. Not only that, but in truth we had a lot more than we actually needed to run the railway as contraction was still going on apace.
And we had, or shortly would have, our own oil as well to run them on (the first confirmed oil find was in 1969)
I would contend that, even if a srategic reserve had been contemplated in 1968, the developments in the North Sea and the removal of steam servicing facilities over the next couple of years would have completely removed any rationale from the idea by about 1971, and if any locomotives were stored rather than scrapped they would all have gone by about 1972.
Just in time for the 1973 oil crisis. MOD management at its best
