Hello Neil, lovely pictures! We were on that train, first experience of a mainline steam loco at proper speeds! Fantastic - I spent much of the journey with my head (carefully) out of the window, savouring the sights and sounds - here are some pics:
Firstly, a couple of the loco at Paddington (apologies to LNER folks, we were of course running on foreign metals, the trip being Paddington to Worcester, under the auspices of the superb Railway Touring Company):
And here's one of the owner, John Cameron, in the cab - where they very kindly allowed lots of passengers to climb up for a few minutes during a water stop:
And lastly, the beating heart of the machine:
Mr Cameron was happy to chat about his two beauties (he also owns K4 The Great Marquess) and having initially confirmed his intention to install them next year in his purpose-built museum as static displays, he then said several times in answer to shouted questions from the crowd that - contrary to recent press reports - he's open to offers. I couldn't really tell whether he was serious though, as the general tone was fairly light-hearted. I asked him why he was taking them out of active service and he said that "they and I are too old to carry on now, we've come to the end of the line and we need to go into a museum".
In common with I'm sure many people here, I hope very much that he changes his mind, otherwise we only have until next summer to see 60009 and 61994 running...
Chas
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