A steamy affair

11:43am Wednesday 12th December 2007

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It has been 40 years since the end of steam locomotives in the North-East. Kester Eddy reports on the efforts made to capture the magnificent engines on film before they went out of service

FOR many who were teenagers at the time, 1967 was the year of Sergeant Pepper and the beginnings of the flower power era.

But for Peter Proud, who began the year as an A-level student in Sunderland, 40 years ago was the end of an era - the end of steam locomotives on the then British Rail network in the North-East.

Like many in the region, Peter was born with railways in his blood.

"I was brought up in a house overlooking the Hetton Colliery main line," he says. "It doesn't sound very much, but it was very busy in the early 1950s with loaded trains going to Sunderland and Staithes and empties going back up to the collieries."

Equally importantly, from the age of six weeks he was on the train every week from Sunderland to West Hartlepool to visit his grandmother. The sights and sounds of the railway made a big impression on him. As a child, he recalls seeing gaslit carriages in LNER livery on local services.

With such a heritage, it is little wonder that by the end of the 1950s, Peter would be found by the tracks, trainspotting with hordes of other kids.

"There was none of this stuff, like today, decrying trainspotters," he says. "It was rather the other way round. If you had a class of 30 lads, in those days 25 would be spotters. The five who didn't were the odd ones."

By 1960, Peter and friends would move further afield to see new locomotives, first to Carlisle and York, and later, as funds and parents would permit, to Manchester, Birmingham and even Bournmouth and Exeter - very long hauls for a young teenager in those days.

And with steam in fast decline, Peter, like many others, was beginning to realise the need to document the changes.

"I began using a Brownie, which took square prints. With a shutter speed of 1/30 I got some wonderfully blurred prints of trains at speed. Then I got my first proper camera, a second-hand Halina 35X.

Later it was the subject of many jokes, but among my peers it was OK and much better than the Brownie."

After all his travels, Peter finds it ironic that by 1967, the North-East would become one of the last bastions of steam in the country. "The North-East was a paradox. Local passenger trains had gone diesel in 1957, but freight soldiered on to the bitter end," he says.

Furthermore, the last sheds with steam, Blyth, Sunderland, Tyne Dock and West Hartlepool, by now hosted the oldest working locomotives in the country, built in the days of the North Eastern Railway.

The J27 and Q6 classes had been hauling coal from pit to port before even the Jarrow March. All had survived Hitler's Luftwaffe, some had even felt the cold shadow of the Zeppelin above.

To see these stout, reliable engines, still soldiering on in 1967 was to see history. They had had attitude before their time. So it was that many of the friends who had first met in stations and depots across the country became regular visitors to some otherwise unlikely tourist spots - and mums from Bristol and Birmingham would hear their sons were off to the likes of Vane Tempest, Ashington and Thornley for the weekend.

One such enthusiast was Ian Krause, then a 19-year-old student who lived in north London - though having been born in Corbridge, Northumberland, he was far from a total stranger to the region. Ian had been travelling up at weekends from the mid-1960s, first hitching, then in his Ford Anglia.

"When I first met Peter Proud he was standing on a gate taking a photo of a train. I watched it collapse under his weight," says Ian, laughing at the memory.

As the summer of 1967 wore on, the focus of enthusiast activity centered on Sunderland, which housed the most active of the last half dozen J27s and Q6s, all working mineral lines in east Durham, most particularly to Silksworth Colliery.

"We would spend all night cleaning the engines, ready to photograph the next day. They were immaculate,"

says Peter, fully aware of yet another irony - that for most of their lives these engines had run in unglamorous dull, soot-covered black.

Although there were hiccups, relations with the engine crews and maintenance staff were unusually close in the last months.

"I would turn up at Sunderland shed at six in the morning and be greeted like an old friend," says Ian.

Drivers, aware of the efforts being made to catch the historic moments on film, would work their locos to the limits, sending columns of smoke to new atmospheric heights and would see the photographic results a week or two later, often over a pint in the local pub.

Ian recalls standing on the top of Ryhope tip, watching the locos slogging up the bank with empties.

"It's an abiding memory, at sunset, watching the trail of smoke coming up from the North Sea and past the tip to Silksworth for ten minutes or more," he says.

"It's all gone now. I've been back. It's a golf course."

He also recalls that people thought the steam era would never end. "There was even talk of using the Lambton tanks, owned by the National Coal Board, if the diesels were not up to working the Silksworth branch," he says.

It did end, of course, and the Lambton tanks were not needed.

Sunderland-based class J27 65894 worked the last regular British Rail goods train in the North- East on the evening of September 8, 1967, adorned with a Blue Star - the symbol of the brewery which produced the enthusiasts' favourite ale.

While steam lingered on in Lancashire for another 11 months, for Peter, as for many others, the end of steam in the North-East left a hole in his life.

"We knew it was going to happen, we could see the writing was on the wall," he says. "I had dedicated my life to this for five or more years. I suppose so many years on, it is quite difficult to recall the sense of impending loss, when the end was nigh."

But, it did not quite all end in 1967. North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group (NELPG) which was formed 40 years ago, managed to save 65894, the last loco in normal service, along with Q6 number 63395 - also of Sunderland and also the last of its kind.

Fittingly, 63395, after many years of repair, is now set to come back into service on the North Yorks Moors Railway in the near future.

* For more information on the work of NELPG log onto www.nelpg.org.uk