Steam World Magazine April 1983 Edition

[Wozy68]

I'm pretty sure most of what’s written below is how I remember it, the most important parts I'm pretty sure I'm 99% correct on...... the infill bits, well, there's been a lot of history and beer under the bridge since then.

Anyway.

Thirty five years ago, because of being a bad boy in class, I was sent off to the library to cool down.

Sat there in front of me was (I'm pretty sure I'm right) Steam World Magazine, latest edition. So with nothing better to do (and hopefully my mates not catching me reading something so uncool) I started to flick through it.

One article caught my eye and I became engrossed in it.

It was about a guy who had fallen asleep on the last train back to Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury was the last stop for the night, everybody got off but he didn’t wake up until some hours later, the train by now was in a siding where it was parked up for the night. He got himself out of the train and headed home.

Nothing unusual there you say, and the story would have ended if not some weeks later he was chatting to a guy I think in a pub. Whilst telling his story about not getting off the train at the station, he happened to tell him what awoke him.

He was awoken by the sound of engines ........ Steam engines. Black painted Steam engines.
This other guy being a bit of a railway buff asked him when this was, and it seems (and I'd assume) the summer of 1982.

Well obviously this is some fourteen years after the end of Steam on BR, and this was pointed out, but the guy was adamant that a number of black painted Steam Engines either awoke him as they travelled through, or awoke him when they were stationary. Not being into trains himself, he thought nothing of it at the time and just made a swift exit from the train.

If memory serves the article then went on to ask why would we still have Steam engines, and for what use.

If my memory is correct, the article talked about in time of a nuclear attack all the electrical stuff we rely on and transport requires, could be frazzled, and so the article suggested that maybe that's why somewhere and somehow a hoard of these engines were kept in case such a thing did happen. The article also mentioned that certain engine numbers were never accounted for when it came to scrapping them.

I never bought a later copy of the magazine so I have no idea if in later additions they found out an answer to this.

So, did the guy dream it, did they really exist and if so, what happened to them?

[blinkythefish]

Wozy68 said:

I'm pretty sure most of what’s written below is how I remember it, the most important parts I'm pretty sure I'm 99% correct on...... the infill bits, well, there's been a lot of history and beer under the bridge since then.

Anyway.

Thirty five years ago, because of being a bad boy in class, I was sent off to the library to cool down.

Sat there in front of me was (I'm pretty sure I'm right) Steam World Magazine, latest edition. So with nothing better to do (and hopefully my mates not catching me reading something so uncool) I started to flick through it.

One article caught my eye and I became engrossed in it.

It was about a guy who had fallen asleep on the last train back to Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury was the last stop for the night, everybody got off but he didn’t wake up until some hours later, the train by now was in a siding where it was parked up for the night. He got himself out of the train and headed home.

Nothing unusual there you say, and the story would have ended if not some weeks later he was chatting to a guy I think in a pub. Whilst telling his story about not getting off the train at the station, he happened to tell him what awoke him.

He was awoken by the sound of engines ........ Steam engines. Black painted Steam engines.
This other guy being a bit of a railway buff asked him when this was, and it seems (and I'd assume) the summer of 1982.

Well obviously this is some fourteen years after the end of Steam on BR, and this was pointed out, but the guy was adamant that a number of black painted Steam Engines either awoke him as they travelled through, or awoke him when they were stationary. Not being into trains himself, he thought nothing of it at the time and just made a swift exit from the train.

If memory serves the article then went on to ask why would we still have Steam engines, and for what use.

If my memory is correct, the article talked about in time of a nuclear attack all the electrical stuff we rely on and transport requires, could be frazzled, and so the article suggested that maybe that's why somewhere and somehow a hoard of these engines were kept in case such a thing did happen. The article also mentioned that certain engine numbers were never accounted for when it came to scrapping them.

I never bought a later copy of the magazine so I have no idea if in later additions they found out an answer to this.

So, did the guy dream it, did they really exist and if so, what happened to them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_steam_reserve

[Gareth1974]

Strategic steam reserve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_steam_rese...

[Wozy68]

I didnt even know about this

So does that mean it existed but we are told it didnt, or just that it didn't. So if it didnt, what did the guy see at Shrewsbury? Just made it up?

Now I've got interested in this, I've found this link.

http://www.willys-mb.co.uk/strategic-reserve.htm

How weird one memery can suddenly bring back another.........

Interestingly I told my father back in the day about the article I read. He worked in REME, in mainteance, basically visiting different locations putting things right, he even had to sign the OSA,

He knew nothing of any of this (well that's what he told me), but when he chatted to his supervisor about it at work in passing, the fella went very quiet..... and the subject was not brought up again.

Edited by Wozy68 on Tuesday 9th January 16:36

[Yertis]

It's rubbish. It might have been considered, and the Swedes did it (which proves it could be done, regardless of those articles I read which say it couldn't) but why keep it a secret? It's a stock of old steam locomotives. Hardly a strategic game-changer with secrecy worthy of stealth technology or code-breaking capability.

[Wozy68]

Yertis said:

It's rubbish. It might have been considered, and the Swedes did it (which proves it could be done, regardless of those articles I read which say it couldn't) but why keep it a secret? It's a stock of old steam locomotives. Hardly a strategic game-changer with secrecy worthy of stealth technology or code-breaking capability.

To be honest, I agree. Just always wondered what the guy at the station actually saw, rather than there was any kind of super secret reserve. The most obvious answer I guess was that he made it up, yet the magazine wanted to believe it.

It's a long time ago now, so I guess we'll never find out what he did/didn't see. Interesting story at the time though.

[williamp]

Its a lovely story, but its like buried spitfires, 250GTO in the shed etc etc..

But there is no point in keeping steam trains wituout the infrastructure- coal bunkers, water towers, turntables plus the driver and maintenance staff..

..besides, a few diesel trains wil do the same job with no additional infrastructure, so why not keep a hoard of these instead?

[Yertis]

williamp said:

Its a lovely story, but its like buried spitfires, 250GTO in the shed etc etc..

But there is no point in keeping steam trains wituout the infrastructure- coal bunkers, water towers, turntables plus the driver and maintenance staff..

..besides, a few diesel trains wil do the same job with no additional infrastructure, so why not keep a hoard of these instead?

To play SSR advocate for a moment, one of the reasons it would be conceived in the first place is that, as well as being affected by EMP, diesels would rely on a supply of imported fuel. Whereas steam engines just need you to dig their fuel out of the ground. For most of the period in which the existence of any SSR would be a worthwhile asset, we had many active coal mines and a principle activity of the railways was carting coal around. So I don't think that, in extremis and during the cold war period, lack of bunkering and water towers would be an insurmountable problem. Turntables are a nice to have, steam engines (at least the ones purported to be in the SSR) run just as well backwards as forwards. With regard to driving and maintaining, plenty of people around back then who knew how to do it, and of course the army still (apparently) periodically trains soldiers to drive steam engines.

[Wozy68]

Like I've said above I'd not posted about this because of any super secret stored steam locos, just interested what the guy did or did not see.

But, after a bit of digging, this seems very balanced to me at least article.

http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/Oubliette/StratReserv...

This paragraph does stand out and makes interesting reading.

'As for the crewing arrangements, it is alleged that a number of TA/army personnel were trained on steam locomotives on the West Somerset Railway in 1989 when the Evening Star was there on loan.

'I e-mailed the West Somerset Railway and asked them if this was true, here is their reply:-

Hi,

Thanks for your e-mail. Evening Star was here in 1989. We are not allowed to comment on the Army - Official Secrets Act. The Strategic Reserve myth is just that; a myth.

Gavin Duenas Commercial Dept

This is an unusual statement, you wouldn’t think that a privately run railway would be covered by the Official Secrets Act. They have not denied that army personnel were being trained how to drive steam locomotives.'

[Yertis]

But that could be for any number of reasons, of which the least likely is driving 9Fs through the smouldering ruins.

[rs1952]

Has nobody else spotted that the story was in the APRIL edition?

Railway World ran a story about the Ruritanian State Railways in their April 1967 edition, complete with grainy photographs...

But there is a fundamental flaw in almost the first sentence. People do not end up in carriage sidings when kipping on trains because they are checked before they leave their terminus to avoid that happening , to collect any lost property and – in my day – to collect up the porn magazines that blokes had bought but wouldn’t be taking home to their wives...

But on to the main substance of the spoof, why is it that people so love a good ol’ conspiracy theory? We had great fun with this topic on the Bristol Railway Archive in 2010, including a link to the willys-mb site mentioned above, and one of the more keen eyed members wrote the following about the photo captioned “shunting at the eastern portal of Box Tunnel”

Tony Perks said:

love the photo shopped picture of the steam loco leaving the tunnel .............strange how the r/h line is identical to the up line even the radius and colouration of the ballast the same

And here is what I had to say:

I said:

The Strategic Reserve story has been doing the rounds for years, of course, and no doubt promulgated by the same sort of people who think Elvis Presley is still alive. When you look at it from a logical point of view (which I hate doing but I've got this far into the post ), the practicalities wouldn't stack up:

1. In a country the size of the UK, what difference would a couple of dozen, or even a couple of hundred, steam locomotives make in the nation's transportation needs? Answer - virtually none.

2. Where would they be coaled, watered and serviced? If you ran, lets say, a freight from Box to London, it would need servicing at the other end. By the end of the 60s there were no facilities left.

3. Even well-maintained steam locomotives of that era tended to be on the unreliable side, minor faults and gremlins turning up quite frequently. It is true that it was usually more practical to limp an ailing steam engine home than it was a first-generation diesel, but if you had 600 tons behind a poor steaming 8F coming up Dauntsey bank, would it just be left there if it failed or what would come to rescue it?

4. We may well have had plentiful coal reserves in this country but, by the time of the end of steam in 1968, we also had natural gas coming ashore from the North Sea and oil would shortly follow. This alone would mean that there would be an adequate supply of fuel for diesel engines in a national emergency, so why go to the bother of retaining some steam engines when, as said at 2 above, there were no facilities left for them.

Picking up on Hobbler's point for a minute, Eisenhower was President between 1953 and 1961. There was no need then for a strategic reserve of steam locomotives because we had over 12,000 of the bloody things running on BR at the time!

By 1968, when the world was being run by Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, Charles de Gaulle and Leonid Brezhnev (put them in your own order of importance!), not only had things calmed down a bit since the Bay of Pigs incident, but we also had a few thousand diesel and electric locomotives roaming the rail system, with all servicing, maintenance and repair facilities in place. Not only that, but in truth we had a lot more than we actually needed to run the railway as contraction was still going on apace.

And we had, or shortly would have, our own oil as well to run them on (the first confirmed oil find was in 1969)

I would contend that, even if a strategic reserve had been contemplated in 1968, the developments in the North Sea and the removal of steam servicing facilities over the next couple of years would have completely removed any rationale from the idea by about 1971, and if any locomotives were stored rather than scrapped they would all have gone by about 1972.

Just in time for the 1973 oil crisis. MOD management at its best

The thread did degenerate into humour, especially when we started talking about a strategic reserve of shunting horses...

It’s here if anybody is interested: http://www.bristol-rail.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?...

[Wozy68]

rs1952 said:

But there is a fundamental flaw in almost the first sentence. People do not end up in carriage sidings when kipping on trains because they are checked before they leave their terminus to avoid that happening , to collect any lost property and – in my day – to collect up the porn magazines that blokes had bought but wouldn’t be taking home to their wives...

You should ask my brother in law about this, he woke up with a severe hangover sat on a train alone in a siding at Shrub hill from a stag do in Oxford on a DMU that failed at Worcester on his way back to Hereford in the late eighties.

Anyway, back on track . My original OP was about what the guy saw. Maybe he did maybe he didn't, maybe it was a ghost train of times past. But was it conceivable, for whatever reason. It sounds very much like he either made it up or dreamt it .

Edited by Wozy68 on Tuesday 9th January 19:29

[droopsnoot]

Wozy68 said:

This is an unusual statement, you wouldn’t think that a privately run railway would be covered by the Official Secrets Act. They have not denied that army personnel were being trained how to drive steam locomotives.'

I might add something like that in, though, if I'd received your email. Just to stoke the fire a bit. Who doesn't like having an excuse to say "I'm sorry, I can't comment on that for security reasons."?

[Wozy68]

droopsnoot said:

I might add something like that in, though, if I'd received your email. Just to stoke the fire a bit. Who doesn't like having an excuse to say "I'm sorry, I can't comment on that for security reasons."?

I thought the same

[FourWheelDrift]

Could it have been a couple of steam engines from one of the local heritage steam museums on their way for some minor maintenance work elsewhere, being moved while the line was not busy?

[williamp]

droopsnoot said:

Wozy68 said:

This is an unusual statement, you wouldn’t think that a privately run railway would be covered by the Official Secrets Act. They have not denied that army personnel were being trained how to drive steam locomotives.'

I might add something like that in, though, if I'd received your email. Just to stoke the fire a bit. Who doesn't like having an excuse to say "I'm sorry, I can't comment on that for security reasons."?

sorry, I cant answer that question

[Yertis]

rs1952 said:

1. In a country the size of the UK, what difference would a couple of dozen, or even a couple of hundred, steam locomotives make in the nation's transportation needs? Answer - virtually none.

2. Where would they be coaled, watered and serviced? If you ran, lets say, a freight from Box to London, it would need servicing at the other end. By the end of the 60s there were no facilities left.

3. Even well-maintained steam locomotives of that era tended to be on the unreliable side, minor faults and gremlins turning up quite frequently. It is true that it was usually more practical to limp an ailing steam engine home than it was a first-generation diesel, but if you had 600 tons behind a poor steaming 8F coming up Dauntsey bank, would it just be left there if it failed or what would come to rescue it?

4. We may well have had plentiful coal reserves in this country but, by the time of the end of steam in 1968, we also had natural gas coming ashore from the North Sea and oil would shortly follow. This alone would mean that there would be an adequate supply of fuel for diesel engines in a national emergency, so why go to the bother of retaining some steam engines when, as said at 2 above, there were no facilities left for them.

Picking up on Hobbler's point for a minute, Eisenhower was President between 1953 and 1961. There was no need then for a strategic reserve of steam locomotives because we had over 12,000 of the bloody things running on BR at the time!

By 1968, when the world was being run by Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, Charles de Gaulle and Leonid Brezhnev (put them in your own order of importance!), not only had things calmed down a bit since the Bay of Pigs incident, but we also had a few thousand diesel and electric locomotives roaming the rail system, with all servicing, maintenance and repair facilities in place. Not only that, but in truth we had a lot more than we actually needed to run the railway as contraction was still going on apace.

And we had, or shortly would have, our own oil as well to run them on (the first confirmed oil find was in 1969)

I would contend that, even if a strategic reserve had been contemplated in 1968, the developments in the North Sea and the removal of steam servicing facilities over the next couple of years would have completely removed any rationale from the idea by about 1971, and if any locomotives were stored rather than scrapped they would all have gone by about 1972.

Just in time for the 1973 oil crisis. MOD management at its best

These are all valid points. But...

I think you're overlooking the ghastly mess that the nuclear scenario would have left our infrastructure in. None of that gas or oil infrastructure you mention would have worked. It would all be completely bksed and irradiated. I think the scenario envisaged is that there's no infrastructure left for anything, and so it's easier to get things moving by improvising what you have to hand (i.e. coal, water) than something that needs a whole support framework.

Key question – why and how did Sweden do it? Different kind of country I know but many of the points you make apply equally to them.

All that said I still agree with my earlier assertion that the urban myth is rubbish.

[rs1952]

Yertis said:

These are all valid points. But...

I think you're overlooking the ghastly mess that the nuclear scenario would have left our infrastructure in. None of that gas or oil infrastructure you mention would have worked. It would all be completely bksed and irradiated. I think the scenario envisaged is that there's no infrastructure left for anything, and so it's easier to get things moving by improvising what you have to hand (i.e. coal, water) than something that needs a whole support framework.

Key question – why and how did Sweden do it? Different kind of country I know but many of the points you make apply equally to them.

All that said I still agree with my earlier assertion that the urban myth is rubbish.

According to someone else who post on the Bristol Railway Archive, and who knows a lot more about these things than I do (as well as his day job he is an active member of a diesel hydraulic preservation group based on the West Somerset Railway) the scenario might not be as bad as that painted:

jules said:

Assuming the purpose of strategic reserve was to have a fleet that would not be disabled by an electromagnetic pulse resulting from a nuclear explosion, back in the late 60s / early 70s there really would have been no justifiable need for the steam locos.

Obviously, such a pulse could completely fry semiconductors for good, but I'll take a bit more convincing it would do the same for large power transformers and such things. It would have to be a very strong pulse to do that, so maybe only if such things were connected to long power lines or overhead catenary to act as power inducing aerials perhaps?

So, let's assume even that the power would be out and early electric locos would be inoperative owing to lack of a power source at worst. We are left with the diesel fleet. Large generators and traction motors in diesel electric locos might get fried up (unlikely to me), but as nothing much before the Class 50s had any semiconductor components, I think it very unlikely they would have been laid low. All the control was done by relays, contactors or pneumatics - probably small enough in scale to be safe from any evil coil-frying pulse.

Which brings me to my (perhaps somewhat biased) point. The hydraulic fleet would have formed a perfectly serviceable strategic reserve. No major power electrics; control solely by relays and contactors - and not a transistor or IC in sight.

Also, if oil had run out, Maybachs could probably have run on waste chip fat at a push ...

As regards the question of why and how Sweden did it, countries do different things in different ways. The fact that another country did it does not mean that we had to,or indeed would want to.

[Yertis]

rs1952 said:

As regards the question of why and how Sweden did it, countries do different things in different ways. The fact that another country did it does not mean that we had to,or indeed would want to.

Once again I'll caveat the following by saying "I agree with you". But for the sake of it... a lot of the criticism of the myth centres around the alleged impossibility of discreetly maintaining a fleet of steam locomotives. Then suddenly Sweden pulls a load of them out of secret sheds. I'm not saying we did it, I'm saying Sweden proved it's technically possible and was for them, desirable.

[rs1952]

Yertis said:

Once again I'll caveat the following by saying "I agree with you". But for the sake of it... a lot of the criticism of the myth centres around the alleged impossibility of discreetly maintaining a fleet of steam locomotives. Then suddenly Sweden pulls a load of them out of secret sheds. I'm not saying we did it, I'm saying Sweden proved it's technically possible and was for them, desirable.

OK – this is PH where we argue with each other for the sheer hell of it - and I’m just as guilty as many others in that regard but, for many practical reasons, this notion of a secret national steam reserve is complete rubbish (as indeed you have already agreed). Let’s look at some of those practicalities that we haven’t yet covered:

1. Any such plan (plot) would have had to have been hatched by the government of the day (the labour one 1964-1970, not that it would have made any significant difference if the other lot were in power at the time. Theoretically it might have been kept secret (most government things were in those days of course) but even so the civil servants drawing up the plan would be aware that steam locomotives need a different kind of maintenance and repair than diesels and electrics.

The railways were nationalised at the time so, if the reserve existed, steps would have needed to have been taken to keep steam servicing facilities available, even if “mothballed.” No such steps were taken – the BR Property Board was busying itself disposing of redundant railway land as quickly as possible, and BR itself was ripping out coaling and watering facilities in the property that it was keeping. You would have thought that the civil service would have had a quiet word with the Minister of Transport at the time about keeping some of them. Funny that never happened...

There would be somewhat less than no point in having a strategic reserve of steam locomotives for which you would have to call out the Fire Brigade to fill them with water every 100 miles or so, for which of course you would need diesel power the fire engine. And we wouldn’t have any of that, remember?

2. Why keep it secret and, even if they tried, somebody somewhere would have got to hear about it, if nowhere else than in railway circles. You know my history – I have been involved in such circles since 1962 and nobody did know anything about it. Now that is particularly odd given the other secret plans the government had that became common knowledge. Not least the government’s secret nuclear bunker under Box Hill. Everybody down to the station cat knew about that if they read the right papers! You can take the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” argument so far and no further.

3. In 1968, at the time of the end of steam, the Beeching Axe had been in full swing for 4 years, and the railway had more locomotives than it knew what to do with – not only redundant steam traction, but also redundant diesels (and a few electrics as well). Why not keep some of them instead of, as the railways did, scrap a lot of them that either never had their original teething problems sorted out or, like the class 14s and 17s, sold them off for industrial use. This is yet another reason why the strategic steam fleet idea just doesn’t make any sense at all.

I am afraid that this whole idea is baloney probably dreamed up in the first place by somebody late at night down the pub or on some particularly potent dope, and believed by the gullible ever since; the sort of people who love to imagine that the government (of all nations of course – it isn’t just the UK) is always up to some secret no-good plot that “they” don’t want “us” to hear about. A bit like the “the moon landings were faked” conspirators, who overlook the uncomfortable truth that the moon missions were not done for scientific reasons, but for political ones – to beat them damn Russkies to it” If those moon landing had been faked, the Kremlin would have provided hard and solid evidence almost 50 years ago. Funny they haven’t – they must be conspiring with the Yanks, too