PlasticMac
Admin Team
Excellent stuff. My Grandad was a GWR driver, on the Bristol Temple Meads to. London Paddington expresses in the late 30s early 40s. Steam railway engines, they really were (are) Vorsprung durch Technik. In my mind Concorde is in the same class. Bit biased, I worked on the prototypes at Filton. Witnessed the first Filton built Concorde take off. Bent the street lamps, near the end of the runway, when the throttle was opened!I went to Swindon Works in early 1980 as part of the service crew of GWR Castle 5051 Drysyllyn Castle after restoration at Didcot after being rescued from Dai Woodham's scrapyard at Barry. It was it's first foray onto the mainline after restoration for the purpose of weighing, to ensure even weight distribution by adjustment of the springs. Here it is standing proudly outside A Shop:
View attachment 90533
The food in Swindon's canteen was sumptuous, a view probably influenced by the fact that we'd been working throughout the previous night! This was all in preparation for the tours to Stratford-on-Avon (Phoenix and Sunset) in January which were to be the last for the GWS's 10-coach GWR Vintage Train. Before that we had a running-in trip to Oxford with the Vintage Train. After running up to Oxford tender-first, the driver was instructed to return at maximum speed to see what the loco was capable of. Sleepy Oxford was certainly woken up that morning; we reached 70mph at Culham, still accelerating but then caught up with a rattler (dmu to non-railway types)! I was on the footplate!
From Audi to the GWR!
RAB
Mac.