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Welcome... August 2010

Derek Rayner features a (secret) steam museum on Orkney to give a flavour of what delegates could see in their leisure time – while John Dunn reports on the steam contingent from the Bon Accord club that took some well-known Scottish engines and enginemen to Lerwick last month, where Shetland Islanders were treated to the long-absent sights and sounds of steam surrounding their attendance at the Shetland Classic Motor Show. To make the ‘triple’, I note that Roger Hamlin’s worldwide trail of the Scottish-built Water Buffalo Tractors led to a working example on Orkney – which came from a previous owner on Shetland!

A LITTLE closer to home, we are brought back with a bump as we learn the harsh reality of commercialism v preservation. Eight pubs in the UK are reportedly closing their doors for good every day, but what happens when one of them is based in an historic paddle steamer, built for the London & North Eastern Railway in the 1930s? The answer is nothing and therefore interior dismantling has already begun, with a three-month contract signed to deconstruct the former Humber ferry PS Lincoln Castle at its base at Alexandra Dock, Grimsby.

Its owner states that he’s tried to sell the vessel in the past three months, with no takers – and of course this is a huge lump of metal for anyone to take on. When the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society says it's too much to take on then you know things are beyond hope. As we saw last year with the example on Merseyside, just because a ship is listed on the Historic Ships Register counts for nothing in the 21st Century. So what point is there in having a ‘feel good’ register as long as your arm – when in reality it has no face, no funds, no mouthpiece and no legal ‘teeth’ to enable these old ladies of the sea to be protected and listed?

Look at Manxman. Look at Ryde. Fairy Godmothers do not exist.

Grimsbarians feel rightly angry at the loss of what they feel is ‘their’ ferry, being such a landmark in their town and a reminder for the older ones that this is how it used to be when they crossed the Humber to Hull before the Humber Bridge was built (and don’t get me started on toll bridges that have paid for themselves many times over and still charge to cross). What makes my blood boil is that something that has now been ‘conserved’  for just as many years as it saw in service history, can just be dispensed with in such a casual manner. ‘Nurse, the screens!’

Colin Tyson
Editor

Image: We should not let this issue of Old Glory pass without doffing our caps to the Middleton Railway in Leeds, which started standard gauge railway preservation 50 years ago this month. Although the Bluebell Railway in Sussex began running passenger trains just a few weeks later, and gained all the publicity because it was an ex-BR line to be run by volunteers – and not an industrial line in Hunslet – we nonetheless salute those early preserved railway pioneers that started what is now a UK-wide multi-million pound leisure and tourist industry. Wallis & Steevens roller No7941 joined the celebrations on 19 June. BRIAN SHARPE