GWR No. 1450 is a 0-4-2 1400 class tank engine built by the Great Western Railway at Swindon Works in 1935.
The Best of...No. 1450
History[]
No. 1450, formally No. 4850, was built by the G.W.R. at Swindon in 1935 at a cost of £2,255, including £497 for the boiler, and spent much of her working life shedded at Oxford working the Abingdon branch. In January 1952, it was moved to Slough shed, where it remained until 1961 when it returned to Oxford.
In 1962, it came west to Exeter, and then to Taunton in 1963 before transfer to the Southern Region and being tried on the steeply graded former London & South Western Railway Axminster to Lyme Regis branch. 1450 was withdrawn from Exmouth Junction shed in May 1965, having covered 823,012 miles, and purchased by the Dart Valley Railway and moved to Buckfastleigh.
It became one of the mainstays of the line in the early days of preservation and worked throughout the seventies and eighties between Buckfastleigh and Totnes, before being sold by the D.V.R. to Mike Little & Barry Cordell in 1991.
In 2012, it was painted black and renumbered to No.1401 as Part Of the "Titfield Thunderbolt" Anniversary Weekend.
It then spent 10 years on the Dean Forest Railway before moving to the Severn Valley Railway in 2014.
It has now restored it to main line standards and teamed it up with auto coach No. 178. No. 1450 can now been seen at a number of preserved railways throughout the country but is currently based at the Severn Valley Railway although it's too small to be used there on a regular basis.
The locomotive will remain at Bridgnorth until its boiler ticket expires in April 2020 although there's a possibility that this may be extended by a year. The hope in January 2020 was that the locomotive would be granted an extension that would enable it to run at the S.V.R. gala in September 2020.
In Fiction[]
- No. 1450 appeared in The Goodies episode, "Daylight Robbery of the Orient Express".
Gallery[]
.jpg "1200px-Severn Valley Railway Spring Gala (13408989494).jpg (315 KB)")
