papagolfjuliet

I don't see why these places cannot be allowed to speak for themselves. It's worked for decades; why the sudden need to talk down to visitors?

There were two systems at Beckton Gasworks serving different parts of the complex, and each system had its own fleet of locos with separate number sequences and different liveries, red ones and green ones. Both the red Beckton No.1 and the green Beckton No.1 survive: the green one is the Penrhyn example and the red one has been in Preston Services' sales catalogue for many years. https://prestonservices.co.uk/item/neilson-tank-locomotive-beckton-no-1/ Not all the new custodians plan to overhaul their new acquisitions. Hawarden will remain a static exhibit but is deemed useful because it fills a gap in the Middleton's collection of Hudswell Clarke 0-4-0STs. The railway now has the Victorian Hawarden plus Henry de Lacy II of 1917 and Mirvale of 1955, demonstrating how the company's basic design changed over the years. Incidentally I'm fairly sure that Kettering Furnaces No.3 did not belong to the NT in the first place - certainly not everything at Penrhyn did, and some loco owners whose machines have been in the same place for sixty years might have had to dispose of their property quickly on being evicted from Penrhyn at fairly short notice. The reason for Haydock's transfer to Havenstreet is that she is very similar to the contractor's loco which built the Freshwater, Yarmouth & Newport Railway and hauled that company's first passenger trains, as seen here: https://www.wcpr.org.uk/Portishead 0-6-0T.html

I don't think it's that much of an oversimplification. Herewith the saloon of that property, which is Grade 1 listed and one of the best surviving Restoration houses in England. That's before we get to the massive DANCE LIKE IT'S 1699 neon sign, or the speech bubbles stuck to all the paintings. The posthumous outing case relates to the donor of Felbrigg Hall, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, whom the Trust decided was gay because he never married. This notwithstanding protests by his surviving relatives and despite the fact that he was friends with both James Lees-Milne and Rupert Hart-Davis, two dreadful old gossips who never kept quiet about the sexualities of people they knew and yet never said a word about Ketton-Cramer.

Oh, you know. Refusing to rebuild a fire damaged stately home, posthumously outing a man who wasn't gay, turning another stately home into a massive children's play area, destroying a centuries old mushroom colony in the name of 'rewilding,' handing kids crayons at a third stately home and letting them scrawl all over the artworks, arbitrarily sacking all the volunteer park guides at a fourth stately home... I may say however that none of those unforced balls up were the reason why I gave up my NT membership and joined the National Trust for Scotland - which is less irresponsible, needs the money more, and has a reciprocal arrangement with the NT such that an NTS card gets you into to all NT properties. No, the final straw for me was the cover of the 2017 handbook. Yuck. No wonder the Collie looks embarassed.

No word as yet about Beckton No.1, but as one of the collection is said to be moving to Kent and none of the current announcements are anywhere near Kent it's fair to assume that the well tank will be heading south. Chatham seems an obvious choice, but that's just a guess. I can't imagine the KESR or Spa Valley having any use for it and I doubt whether the East Kent has the resources to look after it.

It's going for a contract overhaul somewhere in northern England. And as I understand it ownership of all of the stock has been transferred. I gather that Vesta and Hawarden and the Coal Tank are all now owned by the BLS.

Update: Haydock is going to the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, and Kettering Furnaces No.3 to the Waterford & Suir Valley Railway.

And there's another good reason for dispersing the collection: I know quite a few people around here who would never set foot in that hateful family's hateful house (whose gatehouse was designed to resemble that of Wormwood Scrubs as a constant reminder to Lord Penrhyn's employees and tenants of what would happen to them if they put a foot wrong) and so paradoxically have a better chance of seeing the locos now that they are no longer on display there.

I hold no brief for the NT - far from it - but to be fair on this occasion it should be noted that while Penrhyn was a nice little museum it was impossible to photograph or even get a decent view of most of the exhibits; the narrow confines of a stable block are hardly ideal for displaying standard gauge engines. The museum was also a hangover from a period in the 1960s when it was NT policy to concentrate collections of particular items at particular properties: railway equipment at Penrhyn, Harpsichords at Hatchlands Park, dolls' houses at Nunnington Hall, and so on. It was an odd policy at the time and it is also odd that the collections remained in situ for so long after the policy was abandoned.

Well, I wasn't speculating. Somebody connected with one of the new custodians told me so.

It's Hawarden, going to the Middleton Railway. Vesta is going to the East Lancs. I gather that ownership of the Coal Tank is being transferred to the Bahamas Locomotive Society. That leaves Haydock and Kettering Furnaces No.3 and Beckton No.1; one of these three is going to somewhere in Kent (Beckton No.1 to Chatham docks perhaps?). About a decade ago Haydock was due to move to Beamish but could not be removed from its corner of the building at Penrhyn. Perhaps that transfer will now go ahead?

Another Glasgow Empire classic: Roy Castle, having played multiple instruments to deafening silence, decides to try a tap dance. After he's finished somebody down below says "Jesus, is there no end tae his bloody versatility?"

Have just remembered that on one occasion when Mike and Bernie were playing the notorious Glasgow Empire, Bernie came on after Mike had already done a couple of jokes and a voice from the stalls said "Suffering Christ, there's two of them."

"People laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now." - Bob Monkhouse "Where would you be without laughter? Here." - Les Dawson

Mind you, we had worse Winters in the 60s: Mike and Bernie.

Plenty of railway footage in this Tonight Programme special from 1963 (the modern introduction by Chris Packham lasts a couple of minutes). Set designer: Ridley Scott.

He played James Hadleigh more or less straight after 'Adam Adamant LIves!' was axed in 1967, first in 'Gazette' in 1968 and then in 'Hadleigh' on and off from 1969 to 1976.

More 'Hadleigh': a brief glimpse of a 40 at speed, followed by a Deltic and an 03 at York. How Hadleigh manages to arrive from London on a southbound train is a mystery for the ages.

Marsh also converted some E4s into 2-4-2Ts, which presumably were not intended for autotrain use.

Have been reminded that DE March converted a couple of Terriers to 2-4-0Ts. Billinton quickly converted them back, so evidently whatever Marsh had been trying to do didn't work.

And there's more. Thanks to stock footage, in this episode of 'The Champions' two of our heroes manage to travel on the Talyllyn and the Ffestiniog at the same time.

More from Lew Grade's stable: Denham Golf Club Halt at the start of this episode of 'Man in a Suitcase.'

This episode of Brian Clemens' ATV anthology drama series 'Thriller' involves a series of murders on a Euston-Glasgow sleeper, which starts authentically enough with a rail blue 86 leaving London. The 86 then magically becomes an unidentified AC loco in 1960s electric blue, then as night falls transforms into some sort of European electric, and eventually reverts to being an 86 just in time to arrive at a 'Glasgow Central' which is in the middle of nowhere and has no OHL or overall roof.

I'm rather fond of the CONTAINS NUTS warnings on packets of... nuts.

Double headed blue Warships at 17' 20" in this newly-uploaded episode of 'Hadleigh.'