No. 78019 is one of 65 BR Standard Class 2 2-6-0 steam locomotives built for British Railways.
Operational history[]
No. 78019 was built at Darlington Works in March 1954 and entered traffic the same year.
It was first allocated to Kirkby Stephen, working on local and banking duties throughout the Lake District. Following this it was shuffled from location to location while in service starting at Willesden, then Nuneaton, and then finally Crewe South.
In February 1955, No. 78019 was fitted with a snowplow and was used to free its sibling locomotive, No. 78018, from a snowdrift that it had become trapped in while on the Stainmore Railway.
No. 78019 was withdrawn from service in November 1966 and was sold to the Woodham Brothers Scrapyard in Barry as scrap. It arrived in the scrapyard in June 1967 and remained there awaiting its fate until March 1973.
Preservation[]
In 1973 No. 78019 was purchased from the scrapyard for preservation. It was moved first to a private site and then to the Severn Valley Railway where it sat for more than 20 years. Then in 1998, following a deal between No. 78019’s owner, Charles Newton and the Loughborough Standard Locomotive Group Ltd, where joint equal ownership of the locomotive was agreed, it was moved to Loughborough and the path to restoration could truly begin. The outcome resulted in No. 78019's return to steam at the Great Central Railway's Summer Gala in 2004.
The locomotive was restored and ran for ten years on the Great Central Railway before the boiler certificate expired in May 2015. After a seven year overhaul, the locomotive moved under its own steam again in October 2022 and returned back into service the following month.
Trivia[]
- No. 78019 is one of four surviving examples of the BR Standard Class 2 2-6-0 left in preservation.
- No. 78019 was the 35th locomotive to be purchased for preservation from the Woodham Brothers Scrapyard.
Gallery[]
