I WASN’T to know it at the time, but when I travelled by train for my first day at secondary school in September 1968, I had missed the official end of steam on British Railways by only a matter of weeks.
Within days, someone had introduced me to my first Ian Allan “combined volume” listing all Britain’s locomotives and other motive power, but the numbers we so avidly jotted down as we waited on the platform at South Croydon station were of diesels and electric multiple units, not steam engines.
The last timetabled steam-hauled passenger service had run from Preston to Liverpool on August 3 that year. A week later a round-trip railtour from Liverpool Lime Street to Manchester Victoria and Carlisle would become the last BR steam-hauled mainline train, and on August 12 a steam ban was introduced on British Railways, marking a turning point in the history of rail travel in Britain.
But you can’t miss something you’ve never known, and in reality the end of steam had been in progress for years, ever since the sweeping 1954 modernisation plan paved the way for the transition to diesel and electric traction.
There were more than 16,000 steam engines on the railways in the mid-1950s but the numbers began dropping rapidly once the controversial Beeching cuts started to bite in the mid-1960s.
The strive for greater economic efficiency envisaged thousands of stations closing, along with some 5,000 miles of track, almost a third of the network.
Even though the last steam train to be built in Britain only emerged from Swindon Works in 1960, within a few years thousands were being withdrawn and sent to breakers’ yards around the country.
All of which meant that by the time we schoolboys were standing on freezing platforms watching the trains go by, steam was long gone. The last few dozen steam engines on the Southern Region had disappeared by the end of 1966. Western Region steam had finished the year before.
That meant large numbers of condemned locomotives arriving at the major BR works for cutting up, and as the pace of withdrawals swamped the storage space at Swindon and Derby, lines of engines began to appear in any available sidings or closed branch lines.
Clearing the backlog meant putting the dismantling of hundreds of locomotives out to tender with private scrapyards, including one which would become famous with railway enthusiasts and preservationists up and down the country – Woodham Brothers of Barry.
In 1959, Dai Woodham spent time at Swindon Works learning how to scrap a steam locomotive, and in March of that year the first batch of Great Western Railway engines was despatched to his sidings in South Wales.
But if most of Britain’s steam locomotives were to suffer an ignominious end in some busy scrapyard, this was one place which did not rush to cut up the steam engines it acquired.
The family scrapyard had a healthy business buying and scrapping withdrawn brake vans and wagons, but although it also acquired almost 300 steam locomotives for scrap, only a small proportion of them were ever cut up.
In the early years many engines were dismantled soon after arrival, but as the numbers of new arrivals increased, additional storage was found and the queues of rusting hulks in the sidings beside the oil terminal began to grow.
Woodhams began to buy Southern Region engines from mid-1964 and in 1965 no fewer than 65 locomotives arrived at the scrapyard, but by the autumn of that year cutting virtually ceased as the scrapmen concentrated instead on breaking up yet more freight wagons and brake vans.
Dai Woodham continued to purchase locomotives until the end of steam in 1968 with many of the later deliveries being of the BR Standard designs. But of almost 300 engines purchased between 1959 and 1968, more than 200 remained towards the end of 1968, when enthusiasts began to realise that Barry might be the only remaining source of locomotives which could be bought for preservation.
Only one engine was saved from Barry in 1968 and it was 1970 before the next locomotive was moved. But by the mid-1970s a mass exodus had begun, despite the poor condition of many of the rusting hulks, stripped of their brasses, copper pipes and whistles.
My own pilgrimage to Barry took place on November 2, 1973. By that stage 44 engines had been rescued, including the Great Western 2-8-0 tank engine 5239 that we would encounter many years later on the Dartmouth Steam Railway in Paignton.
Lovingly restored in the striking dark green livery of the Great Western Railway, it was hard to believe that this was the same engine we had seen rusting in the sidings at Barry, where it had languished for 10 years before being rescued in the summer of 1973.
Rescuing those rusting hulks is a truly monumental task that might typically take 10 years or even double that, depending on funding, volunteer availability and the locomotive’s condition.
Rescuing those rusting hulks is a truly monumental task that might typically take 10 years or even double that, depending on funding, volunteer availability and the locomotive’s condition.
Another tank engine which suffered a much longer stay at Barry was 2-6-2T 5526, which arrived in November 1962 and wasn’t liberated until 22 years later in July 1985, the 166th loco to be saved from the yard.
A stalwart of the South Devon Railway, the ‘Small Prairie’ tank has clocked up more than a million miles in service and popped up on different preserved lines around the country, from Swanage in Dorset to Kent and Oxfordshire, where I found her visiting the Chinnor and Princes Risborough line.
Built in 1928 at the GWR’s Swindon works, the engine saw service all over the West Country before it was withdrawn. Restoration work started in 1985 but the engine has only been fully back in service since 2003.
Back in Barry, the departures continued. Unbelievably, many of the dozens of rusting engines we saw there on a rainy November day in 1973 would be rescued as the years went past, a vivid reminder of just how important a role was played in the story of railway preservation by David Lloyd Victor Woodham MBE, BEM, otherwise known as “Dai”.
He died in 1994 but his legacy lives on in the hundreds of steam engines rescued for posterity from what could have been their final resting place, rusting away in the sidings down by Barry Docks.