Staffordshire and Lancashire Steam Sheds

Lostock Hall MPD in April 1968

Stoke (5D) MPD in 1966. There were 46 steam locomotives on shed (8 Ivatt '2MTs', 13 'Black Fives', two 'Jinties' 0-6-0T, 14 Stanier '8Fs' and 9 Standard '5MTs'). Fifteen years previously it had an allocation of almost 100, but the Midland classes, tank engines and 0-6-0s, were gone, except for those last two 'Jinties'. The original allocation was numerous enough to require a capacious shed, and thus it remained, draughty, echoing and periodically blasted by pestilential clouds of coal-dust swept up by the cold Staffordshire winds.

Arnold Bennett's Five Towns had lost their infernal smoking pottery kilns but in other ways they were just the same as ever. People would still walk three miles to save a ha'penny on the daily shopping. Most of the shops in Burslem were gloomy in their poverty, and half of them were permanently closed down.

A young lad showed us around the depot. He was 16 and previously he would have been an engine cleaner, but at this stage no BR employee cleaned engines. He was as thin as a rake and had the wan, pasty complexion of someone who was under-nourished. When he scrambled onto the buffer beam of a 'Black Five' and swung open the door to brush the cinders out I noted how frayed his overalls were and how large the holes were in his shoes. Yet the locomotives looked cared for, at least mechanically. It was a workaday shed and one that went about its business efficiently and without fuss until the end.

Rosegrove (10F) on Saturday 6 April 1968. At the buffers on one of the back roads in the open air Stanier '8F' no. 48375 was stored in piteous condition, having sustained severe front-end damage, including loss of the pony truck, five months previously in a collision with a local goods train. Lying there awaiting the final tow to the cutting yard, it was a reminder of one of the most heart-rending episodes in modern British railway history. At Chapel-en-le-Frith on 9 February 1957 Driver John Axon was in charge of no. 48188 on an unfitted freight from Buxton to Warrington. A faulty braised collar on the steam brake-pipe union left them with no stopping power and a falling gradient towards Chapel station. The '8F' and its train eventually smashed into the preceding train in the station but Axon stayed on board in a final heroic attempt to apply the brakes. He was awarded the George Cross posthumously. Ewan MacColl wrote a ballad about the crash and recorded it on an Argo Transacord EP, with Peter Handford's steam recordings as a background.