Memories of the daily Milk Train (?) - L1T hauled

[eelhouse]

Hi

I am new to this site.

I just wanted to share a memory of my past and also pose a couple of questions.

I attended Brackensdale Junior School in Mackworth , Derby. I had recently become a train spotter at the age of 9
(1961) and a friend and I would regularly bunk off after lunch at school each day to spot the (what we called) 'milk train'.
It was about a 5 minute run to Greenwich Drive South allottments from where we could see the engine numbers.
The train, invariably was hauled by an L1 tank engine and over several months we must have seen nearly the whole class of locomotives.

It would turn up as regular as clockwork on the down route from (?) and pass under Kingsway bridge and past the allottments before disappearing into Mickleover tunnel. It was at the same time every school day, just after 13:55 giving us just a few seconds to spare on our run back for the afternoon register.

I have "The Friargate Line" by Mark Higginson but cannot find any references to this particular train.

I was wondering if anyone might be able to shed any more light on this fantastic memory from the old Friargate "Steam" days.

In particular can anyone please confirm that this was a milk train, and if so where did it set out from, where was its destination (Egginton dairy?) and what time would the train return and where to?

Also where were these L1s shedded? I know they were discontined a couple of years later which was such a shame as to me they were very elegant engines.

If anyone can help me out I would be very grateful, either through this forum and/or by email which is

clive.armitage@hotmail.com.

Thanks for reading

Clive

[Flamingo]

The L1 tanks that you saw would probably have been from Colwick shed near Nottingham, or Grantham. They didn't have all that many so I doubt you would have seen more than about a dozen or so different ones. The rest were mostly in the London area, East Anglia and the Middesbrough area. The L1s were not all that popular engines and were rumoured to be expensive to maintain.

[2512silverfox]

In earlier days there was a regular milk train from that branch through to London and this m,ay be what you used to see. I Imagine that by the time you saw it regularly it would mainly have been made up of tanks since churn traffic had mostly disappeared by then. There have been some notes about this recently elsewhere on this forum.