After 18 years of languishing in a shed, the class Q6, number 63395, locomotive is about to regain its rightful place on the rails.

THEY called her the Consett Engine and, if they were raggy trousered train spotters, other things much ruder. Class Q6, number 63395, status unloved. She was a workhorse, a store horse, a muck and bullets freight locomotive which humped scrap from the yards of Teesside and Darlington to the smelting pot that was Consett Steel Works and got precious little thanks for her efforts.

Now 87 years old, the ugly duckling is on the verge of becoming a very fine swan indeed.

For the past two-and-a-half years, the locomotive has been undergoing meticulous restoration at the former Stockton and Darlington Railway carriage works in Darlington - externally, at any rate, a Grade II listed ruin.

This week she was again inched out into the open, as bright burnished as the knob on the station master's netty, as oily as a politician's handshake.

If not quite a passing out parade it was a Consett party, nonetheless - there to greet her, 65-year-old former railway fireman Brian Swales, who'd spent many a shift flogging the iron horse and many more, unpaid, helping bring her back to life.

"We must have collected scrap from every Hanratty's yard in the area," he recalled. "I never really saw Consett going up, because my back was always bent, but there was a nice view coming down.

"It's wonderful to see her looking so beautiful again, and to know that the job is nearly finished."

There, too, was fellow North East Locomotive Preservation Group member Fred Ramshaw, who insisted on using the technical terms. "This is to check that the waggly bits all work," he said.

Number 63395 had been built in Darlington in 1918, shedded there throughout her working, wheezing, hard labouring life, was sentenced to the scrapyard in 1967.

Though apparently reprieved by a bid from a group of Newcastle University students, it proved an offer which could contemptuously be refused when UDI in Rhodesia pushed up the price of copper. Again 63395 awaited the cutters' torch - and that's when the NELPG sprang, perhaps staggered, to the rescue.

The night before the engine was due to be driven from condemned cell to railway gallows, so the story goes, NELPG members took the driver out for a drink - well, not so much a drink as a tender full.

The driver didn't turn in the following morning. By the time the journey could be re-rostered, NELPG, then barely a year old, had raised the extra money.

Restored, the locomotive operated on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway in the early 1980s, needed a major overhaul in 1984 and, by no means first in line, spent 18 years abandoned in a shed.

A group of NELPG volunteers, mainly in their 60s but still just overgrown Railway Children, began restoration at Darlington in 2002.

Work on the boiler has been going on simultaneously on the NYMR at Grosmont; the tender was restored ten years ago by Manpower Services Commission trainees at ICI Wilton.

In a fortnight or so, the various bits will be reunited. In the autumn, they think, the ugly duckling will be swanning - pulling passengers - on the NYMR.

Even though almost all the labour has been unpaid, the total cost of restoring the Q6 is estimated at £250,000.

Richard Pearson, one of the overseers, is - alone - a child of the diesel age. His dad hadn't been much of a steam buff, either, until he caught a whiff of the 1975 cavalcade at Shildon.

"After that, I just grew up with it," he said. "It's not just a piece of machinery, you have to have a real affection for it. You wouldn't spend all this time and effort and not love it." Fred Ramshaw agrees. "I love this old engine as much as I love a good whisky, that's how much I love her."

Brian Swales talked of schooldays near Darlington station when they'd get the stick for looking out of the window for the Barney Flyer - "you often got a good engine on the Barney Flyer" - of the problems of getting up steam on the bank into Consett, of double loads and bits of bonuses and of becoming disillusioned when diesel power took over.

"With steam every day was different, every engine was different, every one had its own little quirks. If you were courting and told her father you were a railway fireman you were in; no-one ever got sacked on the railways."

Still fired with enthusiasm, like so many more, he hopes again to be on the footplate in the autumn. Brian knew she'd look magnificent - the little engine that could.

* The North East Locomotive Preservation Group would welcome new members. Details from the North Road Railway Museum in Darlington.