7027 Thornbury Castle

As our preserved locomotives get older the necessary overhauls tend to get more involved and more expensive. The time, money and resources equation is never constant.

One of the advantages of having a number of engines of the same class ought to be that there should always be an example or two in service. If one example presents a problem or two during an overhaul and needs more time to be devoted to the task this is not exactly what you want to happen but it does. The Castle is a significant design and we are fortunate that we have a number of them and so there should always be examples in working order. There are other classes which preservation has in relative plenty and there should always be a number of these working too.

If we only have one example of a type or class this presents another series of problems particularly if an example in question is very popular and drives the wider public awareness of the movement. Some examples have taken a long time to return to work and other examples are never going to.

We might believe that the steam locomotive is both a work of science and a work of art. The same might be said about other parts of our railway heritage. Work of art ...........

Works of art need restoring too. Paintings of many and various kinds on canvas, board or panel created using a wide variety of pigments created using many techniques by an almost countless collection of individuals. Time takes its toll on them. They get damaged by malice or misfortune. The varnish yellows and browns, in time obscuring the original artist's intent. Those who work on restoring fine art are highly skilled and have undergone many years of training. The art they work on can be worth many millions of pounds, dollars or euros, pick your currency of choice. Interestingly they have codes of ethics and practice. They keep records of what they do and ensure that all work that they carry out is reversible.

Now I am not saying that our charges are as valuable as those famous works of Gauguin, Klimt or Modigliani but there again this depends on the individual. I like art well enough but given the choice would rather own a Gresley or Chapelon Pacific than a da Vinci. Would I be the owner or would I have taken on the custodianship for a period of time? I will have taken on the responsibility of looking after this artefact for a period before it passes on to another.

How should I behave while this artefact is my responsibility? How should I treat this item? How ought I to respect it? What should be my (our) code of ethics and practice? Forgery and fakery; the world of creative art doesn't deserve it and our world of railway preservation has things going on within it that it does not deserve either.

 

I agree with @35B that JJP taking the moral high ground on all this leads us back to the SDRT and Washford.

I think that JJP would do well to exit this debacle once and for all.

 

Indeed yes Earl of Mount Edgecombe, rather than Bathurst......

 

No quarrel with that. My comment was specifically responding to the question

 

I can't see that 7 Castles and a Star is going to cost any less than 8 Castles.

On a minor point of pedantry, it's also worth noting that even if they all belonged to one organisation, dedicated to running all of them as much of the time as possible, they would each spend about 2 years in every ten in bits under overhaul, so more like 330k a year.

I don't know what a typical daily steaming fee is for a Castle, but it's probably going to be in the order of £1000 (given that you can get £500 for an Austerity on a good day). That's 50 days steaming a year over a ten year ticket to pay for a £500k overhaul - i.e. running Sat/Sun every other weekend. That's working it fairly hard, but certainly not in the realms of the unimaginable (although possibly not for all eight if they are all on the hire market at once).

 

While doing your sums, you need to allow for the costs of running maintenance during a loco's period in traffic. No matter how much a locos earns, not all of that will be available for the overhaul when that becomes due.

 

They wouldn’t need to run at once but some would be condemned to spend years rusting away in sidings waiting for the finances to catch up

 

Indeed. Has any new build come out going "well, that was cheaper than we thought it would be..."

 

That's brave, best keep an eye on the visiting boilers in case the 47xx group lop one off while its there.....

 

Which year?

 

Best do a count on the No. 1 boilers too. They might all end up as Stars!

 

Hatching an inside Job then?

 

Off topic somewhat, but must say that it is easier to understand why John Cameron wants to leave a legacy for 61994 and 60009 in the form of a permanent, secure and publicly accessible home for both locos. Assuming he plans to leave a sufficient sum to offer an annuity to cover the annual running costs of the facility, both locos probably have one of the securest futures outside of the NRM.

 

Small problem of him having not yet been able to build this permanent, secure and publicly accessible home.

 

The best way of having them accessible to the public is have them in travelling around the country hauling trains. I do understand that John Cameron didn’t want them left in sidings awaiting overhaul for years but a guarantee that their out of ticket time would be spent safely in a museum would satisfy that worry.

 

I did say 'wants to'! The building has already been built and he is currently in the process of a change of use application to allow the locos to be moved there at some point in the future.

 

That’s only valid as long as the trustees follow that principle. There are plenty of instances of those in charge of a loco (whether trustee or owner) changing direction.as evidenced by 7027.

 

Which takes us back to the question of how the organisation is set up, and the authority of it's members to exercise control over the decisions taken. As a number of previous threads attest, that is not always straightforward.