1966: The End was Nigh

'Black Five' in the twilight at Edale, 1965

In 1966 some 1281 steam engines were withdrawn from BR service. The average was almost 100 a month, with a peak of 223 in the last month of the year. The rapid pace of redundancies and concentration of survivors on fewer depots had a considerable effect on the geography of sheds. In 1959 there were 57 divisions containing 330 numbered MPDs. There were also 179 listed stabling points and subsheds. Fifty-one sheds were closed in the next three years and a further 87 in the following four years. In addition, those seven years saw the closure of 142 subsheds and stabling points. Many of the remaining sheds were renumbered, either singly by transfer between areas, or as entire areas. The impact was greatest on the Western Region, which in 1959 had 66 numbered locosheds and 62 subsheds or stabling points, but in 1966 had only 27 and 4, respectively (a few, like Weymouth and Birkenhead, had been transferred to other regions or consolidated with other sheds in the same town). At the same time, reorganization brought the number of MPD divisions down to 51 by November 1962 and 42 by August 1966. In 1966 alone, 18 depots closed completely and a further nine closed to steam. And the rhythm of closures and consolidations accelerated progressively until, in August 1968, the last five steam depots, all of them in Lancashire, were shut down.

The last shed to be transferred was Colwick, which went from the Eastern Region (40E) to the London Midland (16B) effective 1 January 1966 and then closed to steam on 12 December, less than a year later. During almost 12 months as a London Midland Region shed, Colwick received in allocation some 98 steam locomotives from 3 classes: 28 ‘Black Fives’, 65 Stanier ‘8Fs’ and five ‘Standard 4' 2-6-0s. It also stabled ten 0-6-0 diesel shunters and the Thompson ‘B1', Departmental no. 29 (ex-61264), which was used as a stationary boiler. On a typical weekend in 1966 one could find more than 50 steam locomotives on shed, and the depot maintained a complement of 60-70 engines. But only 15 remained allocated there for the whole year. Indeed, the average residence time for all the 98 engines was slightly less than seven months. At the lower end of the scale, seven locos remained less than two months and six less than one month. Twenty-nine were withdrawn during 1966 or at the end of the year, and all of the others were dispersed widely about LMR shed areas 2, 8, 9, 10 and 16--i.e. from Birmingham and Nottingham to north Lancashire. For example, Stanier ‘8F’ no. 48600 arrived at Colwick during the week ending 22 October 1966, was reallocated to Sutton Oak (8G) on 12 November and withdrawn there a few weeks later. Its sister engine, no. 48282, at Colwick since Christmas 1965, was reallocated to Kirkby in Ashfield (16E) on 16 July 1966, sent to Patricroft (9H) on 12 November, and was returned to Kirkby a month later on 17 December 1966. One wonders how the shed staff remembered which locos were at home and which visiting!

While the locomotive allocation situation looked increasingly nightmarish in its complexity, there were also growing problems of locomotive reliability associated with declining standards of maintenance. In the final months of the Great Central main line from London Marylebone to Nottingham Victoria, which closed on 5 September 1966, the run-down state of the Colwick ‘Black Fives’ was more than a mere visual impression. Three of them failed at the southern end during the last fortnight of operations, and the locomotive chosen and cleaned up for the last all-steam return trip, no. 44825, failed on Colwick MPD with injector trouble and had to be replaced at short notice by its grimy sister, no. 44984. Fortunately, under skilled hands this locomotive put up a valiant show of speed on its last turn to Marylebone and back.

In the final months, the sheds located in the more well-heeled towns and cities were successively closed or converted to diesel depots. This relegated steam to places in the north where poverty and deprivation held out. Bolton, Stoke, North Blyth, St Helens--to see their backstreets was an education in social history for a young lad from the relatively affluent south. At St Helens, I recall the brick terraces of back-to-back ‘two-up, two-down’ houses, with their outside privies and washing flapping in the breeze. At Stoke I remember the thin and undernourished young engine cleaners scraping the ash from the bottom of ‘Black Five’ smokeboxes. Their overalls were worn through, their shoes full of holes and their complexions grey. At Bolton the cobbled streets, terraces of working men’s cottages and corner shops on the way to the shed were perfect L.S. Lowry scenes. It was a spontaneous education in geography: who in the South knew that to get from 10F Rosegrove MPD to 10D Lostock Hall one had to change at somewhere with a name as picturesque as Church & Oswaldtwistle?

Even where towns were more prosperous and still had steam, British Railways ran it down so much that it always looked more like an anachronism than a symbol of former glory. In March 1966 Buxton MPD, which was still two years away from closure, had an allocation of two dozen 8Fs, plus some Ivatt 2MTs, ‘Black Fives’ and the three J94s used on the Cromford and High Peak line (nos. 68006, 68012 and 68079), but the roofless shed and grimy engines contrasted starkly with the gentile villas of the spa town. So it was too amid the market-town prosperity of Shrewsbury, another location with a roofless MPD full of unkept locomotives.

By April 1968 Carnforth MPD (10A) still had a complement of 25-30 steam locomotives, augmented by half a dozen more being serviced for return journeys and a dozen stored engines awaiting scrapping or preservation. As usual by then, the main types were ‘Black Fives’ and Stanier ‘8Fs’, with a few ‘Standard 5s’ and ‘9Fs’, for the variety had well and truly gone out of steam and nearly all the more unusual types had already been cut up. Carnforth was a spacious depot and on a fine afternoon it had as much the air of a scenic attraction as that of a working MPD. In sum, it was in transition between BR engine shed and Steamtown visitors’ centre that it later became. Men, women and children milled around and climbed up into the cabs of the locos, especially no. 70013, Oliver Cromwell, which was already accorded preserved status. The movement of a ‘9F’ under the coaling stage, accompanied by the thunderous clang of coal into the tender, was observed as if it were a piece of theatre, a spectacle dreamed up to entertain the watching crowds.

And so ended 140 years of steam traction on Britain’s public railways. The process of doing away with it was termed ‘rationalisation’ though, as the observations reported above show, ‘irrationalisation’ would have been a more apt description. The future looked grim, but we were not then able to predict the extraordinary success of the preservation movement, or that more than 200 locomotives would be brought back from Barry scrapyard. The spectacle was over, but in some ways it was just beginning.