This coming Saturday (15/01/11) at the Astolat model railway Exhibition in Guildford Fisherton Sarum will be hosting some of the locomotives seen on the Southern Railway (yes I know technically it was a region by then) during the locomotive exchanges held during April and June 1948.

In the immediate aftermath of the formation of British Railways the newly formed Regions were generally allowed to continue the locomotive build programmes that had already been approved and put in place by the previous railway company up until the end of 1950. In the meantime it was decided to compare a number of engines from the previous big four in order to consolidate designs and good practice for the future locomotive development of the new organisation after 1950.

The exchanges were to trial locomotives in three categories: Express Passenger, General Purpose and Freight Locomotives. The intention was that each locomotive in each category would be trialled on each of four selected routes, although due to some restrictions, explored later, this was not always the case. Locomotives and their crews from each region had a small number of runs on each route, the week before, to gain limited route knowledge (although generally recognised as not enough) prior to the main test runs for which dynamometer cars were attached.

The trials took place from April 1948, commencing with Express Engines on the Kings Cross – Leeds route, and concluded in September 1948 with the Freight engines on the Eastleigh – Bristol route.

With the absence of water troughs on the Southern Region and therefore no water Scoop equipment on either the ex Southern Railway Merchant Navy or West County Class locomotives it was required to provide different tenders to enable either water to be collected on route for the ex SR locomotives and to increase water capacity for the ex LMS locomotives when operating on the Southern Region. The ex LNER A4 pacific’s used on the Southern Region already had 5000 Gallon tenders so ran with their own but lettered “British Railways†in full.

The ex SR locomotives were therefore paired with Stanier 4000 gallon tenders, whilst the Duchess and Rebuilt Scot classes gained ex Ministry of supply (WD) 5000 gallon tenders when working on the SR metals.

The Stanier tenders fitted to the ex SR 4-6-2s (that also all gained extra long smoke deflectors for the trial) unfortunately were not painted in malachite to match the engine but remained in black with British Railways in full in white lettering on the side. The 5000 gallon tenders WD tenders as fitted to Duchess Class 46263 “City of Bradford†and Rebuilt Scot were curiously lettered LMS in cream with maroon line rather than British Railways even though the locomotives had been renumbered with a 4 prefix in white on the cab sides.

On the Southern it was the Waterloo – Plymouth route that was used with locos changing and being serviced at Salisbury (and therefore in my world Fisherton Sarum)

The locomotives appearing on Fisherton Sarum representing some of the crew training runs (as I haven’t built the correct dynamometer car yet!) will be as follows:

Duchess Class 46263 “City of Bradfordâ€

Rebuilt Royal Scot Class 46154 “Hussarâ€

A4 Class 60033 ‘Seagull’ (Complete with modified slightly cut down tender to enable the water cranes to be used at Euston)

(She is so hot of the workbench I do not even have a picture of the finshed model yet!)

West Country Class 34006 “Bude†with Stainer tender. Although not actually used for one of the trial runs on the Southern in this condition she did run at least one service train from Waterloo in this condition.

The show is open between 9.30 and 17.00 at the Guildford Methodist Church in Woodbridge Road, Guildford, Surrey GU1 4RG and further details can be found at the clubs own website here or on the RMweb show thread here.

I look forward to seeing a few Rmwebbers on Saturday.