The Bristol Railway Archive

OK, now that we've completely hijacked the thread on the Yatton-Clevedon preservation proposals and turned it into"The Strategic Reserve" thread (sorry about that - I suppose it was me that started it ) here's a few more howlers from the "fountain of truth" that is the internet:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread217309/pg1
http://englishrail.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... m-reserve/
http://dallashistory.freeforums.org/the ... t3904.html

A slightly more objective one:
http://sites.google.com/site/derelictio ... am-reserve

Of course, the real truth is that GWR 0-6-0PTs 1646 and 1649 were never actually transferred to Scotland, they were sprited away to provide the Prime Minister's train with motive power to get him/her slowly but carefully (you don't know what you might find down the Bristol main line from Paddington after a nuclear explosion) to the bunker at Box Hill.

1646 and 1649 were stored in a secret station under Downing Street, and the line ran undergound to a secret junction at the North Pole (or I think thats what I read somewhere) to join the main line westward.

All those photograhs of these two engine working The Mound branch were all faked by MI6

Robin Summerhill wrote:OK, now that we've completely hijacked the thread on the Yatton-Clevedon preservation proposals and turned it into"The Strategic Reserve" thread (sorry about that - I suppose it was me that started it ) here's a few more howlers from the "fountain of truth" that is the internet:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread217309/pg1
http://englishrail.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... m-reserve/
http://dallashistory.freeforums.org/the ... t3904.html

A slightly more objective one:
http://sites.google.com/site/derelictio ... am-reserve

Of course, the real truth is that GWR 0-6-0PTs 1646 and 1649 were never actually transferred to Scotland, they were sprited away to provide the Prime Minister's train with motive power to get him/her slowly but carefully (you don't know what you might find down the Bristol main line from Paddington after a nuclear explosion) to the bunker at Box Hill.

1646 and 1649 were stored in a secret station under Downing Street, and the line ran undergound to a secret junction at the North Pole (or I think thats what I read somewhere) to join the main line westward.

All those photograhs of these two engine working The Mound branch were all faked by MI6

Now come on Robin, this is almost bordering on the silly!

Up until a couple of months ago I would have been the very last person to give any credence to the idea that a Strategic Reserve ever existed.

However I am now not so sure but my theory doesnt involve ex BR locomotives but engines owned by the MOD.

Several months ago I came across a picture of Army Department Austerity (J94 type) locomotive No AD 199 at Longmoor Military Railway in the 1950's. Further research revealed this engine was one of a batch totalling 55 locos ordered by the MOD and for which at the time it appeared they had no immediate use requirement . No 199 was delivered to Longmoor in 1953 and put in store , for the next ten years it was moved around a number of depots including Thatcham , Westbury Ammunition Depot and Bicester but saw little use remaining in store most of the time at these places. It returned to Longmoor in 1966 and its said to have been put up for sale and scrapped by 1968 but I have yet to find any evidence of by whom , where or when it was actually scrapped . It would still have been in virtually new condition.

So a possible theory is did the MOD have a small reserve locomotive fleet spread around a number of depots ? Does it still exist ? There are places in MOD ownership that no-one from the general public has access to . For example in Herefordshire is an ex Ammunition Depot now used by a very secretive army unit for training which although not connected to the rail system for many years still has internal standard gauge track leading into buildings and outside of which stand a number of items of rolling stock as revealed by Google Earth pictures.

Probably just more wishful thinking but there is always that slight element of doubt.

Hobbler wrote:Up until a couple of months ago I would have been the very last person to give any credence to the idea that a Strategic Reserve ever existed.

No 199 was delivered to Longmoor in 1953 and put in store , for the next ten years it was moved around a number of depots including Thatcham , Westbury Ammunition Depot and Bicester but saw little use remaining in store most of the time at these places. It returned to Longmoor in 1966 and its said to have been put up for sale and scrapped by 1968 but I have yet to find any evidence of by whom , where or when it was actually scrapped . It would still have been in virtually new condition.

However I am now not so sure but my theory doesnt involve ex BR locomotives but engines owned by the MOD.

Probably just more wishful thinking but there is always that slight element of doubt.

A nice idea, but the MOD have some odd ways of disposing of things so I would not be in the least surprised that no records of scrapping exist

A friend of mine who is retired HGV driver tells of the days he worked for the MOD in Corsham, and one day he was detailed to take a lorry load of scaffolding up to Barrow in Furness.

The scaffolding kept slipping around on the flatbed trailer, and every couple of miles he had to stop and resecure the load.

When he eventually got to Barrow he was told to offload it into a skip, because it was going for scrap. Clearly it hadn't entered the MODs mind to flog it to a local scrapyard near Corsham

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.

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

Well, Robin pointed out to me that I'd completely missed this thread when it was going on back in 2010, but I don't think it's too late to put my 2p worth in 3 years later

Assuming the purpose of strategic reserve was to have a fleet that would not be disabled by an electromagnetic pulse resulting from a nuclear explosion, back in the late 60s / early 70s there really would have been no justifiable need for the steam locos.

Obviously, such a pulse could completely fry semiconductors for good, but I'll take a bit more convincing it would do the same for large power transformers and such things. It would have to be a very strong pulse to do that, so maybe only if such things were connected to long power lines or overhead catenary to act as power inducing aerials perhaps?

So, let's assume even that the power would be out and early electric locos would be inoperative owing to lack of a power source at worst. We are left with the diesel fleet. Large generators and traction motors in diesel electric locos might get fried up (unlikely to me), but as nothing much before the Class 50s had any semiconductor components, I think it very unlikely they would have been laid low. All the control was done by relays, contactors or pneumatics - probably small enough in scale to be safe from any evil coil-frying pulse.

Which brings me to my (perhaps somewhat biased) point. The hydraulic fleet would have formed a perfectly serviceable strategic reserve. No major power electrics; control solely by relays and contactors - and not a transistor or IC in sight.

Also, if oil had run out, Maybachs could probably have run on waste chip fat at a push ...

Of course, it was only a couple of years before the end of steam that the last shunting horse was "withdrawn" - "Charlie" at Newmarket in 1966.

My hunch would be that a strategic reserve of "Charlies" could have been kept to keep the nation's railways running in an emergency - Ok, not as fast as a steam engine but fuel supplies were plentiful...

For obvious reasons they wouldn't have kept them at Corsham, or not underground anyway - you'd need a lift to get them back out again. However, as the believers of conspiracy theories already know, there is a "secret" motorway junction at The Gibb between junctions 17 and 18 of the M4. The more foolish of these people think that this was put there to serve the MOD bases at Corsham (which is a little daft because the roads between the two are lousy, but we mustn't let practicality get in the way of a good story) and/or to give Prince Charlie a quick way from the M4 to Highgrove (which is equally as daft because it would be quicker to go via Swindon/ Cirencester).

No - the true reason for this secret junction was for the government and its agents to quickly get to the strategic reserve of "Charlies" -hidden in plain sight at Beaufort House, and regularly exercised and serviced by the Beaufort Hunt, which of course was only a couple of miles away on a decent road.

These 0-4-0N's (N for nag, by the way) were classified 2F by the MOD. Their passenger counterparts, the 0-4-0F's (F for foxhounds) were classified 1P, and were also exercised and serviced in the same way. They were to be used in tandem for passenger workings because they could get up a good lick of speed as long as the load was not excessive, and the idea came from the widespread use of the 0-4-0H (huskies) in multiple within the Arctic circle. The 2Fs were stronger and could also be used on passenger working but more suited to moving heavy loads more slowly, but were once considered for passenger work on the Bath to Evercreech section of the S&D - post March 1966.

The 1Ps were probably the more reliable of the two classes, because their fuel supplies were almost limitless - any old scraps put into the firebox would do including, it has to be said, things that fell out of the back of the 2Fs...

Everything went on quietly and efficiently in the background, until one day the government came along and banned fox hunting, clearly not aware of the significance of the Beaufort strategic fleet of "Charlies" (you can never trust the Civil Service to think of everything). Princess Anne was incandescent - she'd always fancied the idea of driving a train just like her great grandfather did back in the 1920s, and now it was to come to nothing.

So what really happened to the strategic reserve - all those "Charlies?" I hear that the 1Ps went to China where the saying is "a dog is not just for Christmas - if you're sparing you can make some last until the New year"

And as regards the 2Fs - I don't suppose you've been eating processed meat for dinner this evening, have you .....


I'm sorry - I must stop writing now, there's somebody at the door. It's a man in a white coat with a contraption that seems to button up around the back.....

Assuming any manual signal-boxes remain, a string of 1P's on its way to shed (kennel) would be signalled 2 -3, 2 - 2, 2 - 2, 2 - 2, 2 - 2, 2 - 2, 2 - 2, 2 - 2, 2 - 2 recurring!
They could speed up services utilising 1P's by running a 1R (Reynard class) in front of the train - observing strict absolute block regulations of course. And on single line sections, the lead 1F on a train could carry the token fashioned into a Bonio shape.

I wish I'd never restarted this now!

jules wrote:I wish I'd never restarted this now!

Sorry - taking the mickey out of conspiracy theories is one of my hobbies