I’m a gnu, spelt G-n-u
Call me bison or okapi and I’ll sue;
Nor am I in the least like that dreadful hearty beast
Oh g-no, g-no, g-no I’m a gnu.

Flanders and Swann, The Gnu Song

WHETHER the gloriously symbiotic Flanders and Swann had heard of class B1 steam locos is uncertain, but our readers certainly have. Jaunty, the journey continues.

Vaguely via Bishop Auckland railway station, we had recalled the happy days of the early 1960s when B1s – usually 61023 Hirola or 61024 Ajax – would head Saturday specials to Newcastle.

Memory clouded: for Ajax read Addax. John Rusby, also in Bishop Auckland, sends a photograph of himself with the nameplate. Eland, also in the picture, was another of the class – all but one of the first 40 named after antelopes.

“Addax was an endangered species limited to the southern edge of the Sahara,” adds John, knowledgably.

The Northern Echo: A gnu
Wildebeest or gnu? It's the same thing, made famous in a song by Flanders and Swann

As the column two weeks ago supposed, the odd one out was 61036 Sir Ralph Assheton. “I think we can conclude that he wasn’t an antelope, though I can find no reference to him in any of my books,” writes Colin Foster who – like the Rev Dr Peter Mullen – spent his childhood hanging around Copley Hill shed in Leeds.

The B1s, he says, were usually pretty mucky. “As someone remarked at the time, not Hartebeest or Wildebeest, but dirty beast more like.”

WE’D wondered if the naming committee had simply run out of antelopes, a theory supported by the column’s twin brother. Though 61010 was Wildebeest and 61018 Gnu, the two animals are one and the same, says Dave. The dictionary confirms that it is so. As the New York Times may still observe, that’s all the gnus that’s fit to print.

WHEN Martin Birtle was a bit bairn in Billingham, the named B1s were known as Bongoes – after 61005, Bongo – and the most frequently encountered on the coast line were Chiru and, once again, Gnu.

He’s also seen a locomotive called Chiru steaming on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, though closer inspection might have revealed it to have been the hitherto unnamed B1 61264 – the only surviving engine of its class – now restored and running on the NYMR.

Clearly versatile, 61264 has also run as 61002, Impala – that being the last B1 in regular service on the line from Whitby to Malton.

Martin’s also sure that he read somewhere that 61264 had run as Gnu, the interlope antelope that earlier had been supposed.

An NYMR spokesman confirms that 61264 is still with them, but is sadly unable to say under which alias it now operates. Another g-nu? Who g-nows?

THERE really was a steam locomotive called Ajax, though as Ken Milgate in Durham points out, it was Jubilee Class 45689, an LMS sandwich between Polyphemus and Leander.

Like them, Ajax was a character in Greek mythology, a warrior of super strength who’d never been wounded until he fell on his own sword. His mate Achilles was a pretty tough guy, too, but had an iffy heel.

It was with Ajax in mind that in the 1950s they launched the bath cleaner of that name – “stronger than dirt”, it was claimed, though perhaps not as affective on B1s. Later it became the White Tornado, but that’s another story.

CLIVE SLEDGER in Aldbrough St John, near Richmond, wishes to make a point – possibly three – about the claim that Bishop Auckland station was unique in having a triangular layout.

Clive’s father always supposed that distinction to belong to Ambergate, in Derbyshire, though there was another on Merseyside. The only three-sided station still fully operational is at Shipley in West Yorkshire.

All this was started by a piece on Gerald Slack’s nostalgic little book on Bishop’s railways, especially the wonderful old station. It costs £3 and is available from the travel centre at Bishop Auckland or from the Head of Steam museum at North Road station in Darlington.

The Northern Echo: One of the latest from Hornby - Flying Seven
One of the latest from Hornby models - known as The Flying Sevens

MODEL citizen, John Briggs in Darlington sends details of the latest from Hornby – L1 class 67777, officially unnamed, but known to all who annually joined the club trip from Shildon to Redcar as The Flying Sevens. Those charged with driving her may have used a more down to earth expression.

The Hornby spec supposes that the Darlington-built locos were known as “Cement mixers”, because of the clanking noise they made. On club trip Saturdays; egg and tomato sandwiches and half a crown to spend, they became chariots of fire.

Crowded trains would run into the Redcar “Special” platform every five minutes or so, every loco that might be moved summoned to the British Railways colours. Shildon’s seemed always to be 67777. Built in 1950, it was back in Darlington – to be scrapped – just a dozen years later.

“The L1 class proved unsuitable for fast, frequently stopping passenger trains,” says Hornby – but when it was bliss in that dawn to be alive, as William Wordsworth almost observed, the club trip was Sevens Heaven.

PERHAPS not as euphorically, the column two weeks ago also mentioned that, in 1847, the more prosaic train service from Cold Rowley – up near Consett – to Redcar took four-and-a-quarter hours. All very well, says Keith Bell – long in Canada but born in north-west Durham – but surely it was Old Rowley? Well, yes, but it says “Cold” on the timetable. Did the early Victorians have a sense of humour after all?

WHEN last we’d trespassed on the railways, it was to record the feathers-flying furore over the removal of the duck – a mallard, of course – from the feet of the proposed statue of Sir Nigel Gresley at Kings Cross station.

Andrew Dow, who championed the statue, resigned as vice-chairman of the Gresley Society after Gresley’s grandsons eviscerated – or at any rate vetoed – the bird on the grounds that it demeaned the great engineer’s dignity.

After 30 years in aviation, Mr Dow spent two years as director of the National Railway Museum in York and was a driving force behind the building of the Tornado steam engine in Darlington.

He lived near Harrogate and died on April 24, aged 71.

A prolific author, including the 3,400-entry Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations, he was also a stout defender of train spotters – which may serve as a sort of rebuffer to those who suppose today’s column to be in its second childhood.

“I have known people who have collected such things as hangovers, speeding points and other men’s wives,” wrote Dow. “I suggest you have a go at them instead.”

Thus enthused, the lovely lady of this house sends for a copy of Dow’s diverting dictionary, in which the eye at once falls to a quote about Shildon. It’s from Railway Magazine’s supplement in 1925 to mark the centenary of the Stockton and Darlington.

“Shildon, if not the birthplace of the locomotive, has been its nursery,” wrote John Dixon.

In the circumstances of today’s column, it’s just a pity that the book contains not a single word about Bishop Auckland.

The Northern Echo: Dr Mike Wood

WONDERFULLY coincidental, the column is just being tucked up when an invitation arrives to the opening of the Class G5 Locomotive Company’s new premises on June 13.

The chairman is Spennymoor GP Mike Wood, pictured above.

Though the original G5s were also made in Darlington – more than a century ago – this one’s being constructed from scratch in Shildon, the first locomotive built in the old town for 160 years. The hand that rocked the cradle rocks it still.