Cath Ex to Cambridge, Ely and Norwich 23/9/18

60009 worked day after day for weeks in Scotland in 1964/65 and turning to the Southern in 1962 N15 30451 worked the same Salisbury turn of the 846 up to Waterloo and 254 back for months according to my photo records. But it was of course working in a different regime and from shed renown for it's care of locos

 

Bit of a silly comparison though, IMHO - there's a massive difference between keeping a loco in steam for weeks on end and the kind of intermittent use common today. If you wanted to design a usage regime optimised to produce minor boiler niggles and ruin availability statistics, you could hardly do better than the current pattern of occasional use with periods unused between, and when in use, a daily diagram that alternates between repeated high intensity sprints followed by periods static, all done with water that varies massively at every top up.

Tom

 

So in essence you are now saying the folk managing No. 9 "over committed", largely by covering for the A1? That amounts to a rock and hard place, if they turned down the A1 jobs their customers would be disappointed and here we are today with a different set of unhappy folk. The effect of the Tyneside water could not have been predicted though so taken in the round it does not seem unreasonable to have taken on the extra work. Hindsight makes fools of us all occasionally.
The nub, of course, is the shallow 8P loco pool. Even fewer on the books of more than one TOC.

 

Bully for you booking on the trip. Some of us were engaged fund raising at the NVR this weekenend as well as sorting the stock for our stall at the NYMR gala.

 

And on another day the loco could have been fine at the FTR and the fault developed at the end of the run. Operating a steam loco is an inexact science and sometimes sh1t happens.

 

Absolutely. Ken Cottam (the ex BR time served steam fitter), who looked after the 10A based fleet during my years there as a volunteer would often say " It does 'em no good...all this stopping and starting, does 'em no good at all!" In some respects, I'm sure JC will be glad to retire from main-line running and who can blame him?

 

The same problems face locos on heritage lines, particularly those who don’t run seven days a week in high season.

 

Completely agree...so given all of that, what a huge debt of gratitude we owe to all the volunteers who keep the steam and water flowing on all railways big and small.

 

I must confess that my first thought on reading all this nonsense again about No.9 was to think that there must be a small part of JC who despite all he has done (and funded) cannot wait for this ticket to be over and get away from the advice and criticism of armchair experts....

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

The moaning of some correspondents reminds me of this 1980s character:-