Firedrake Files No.8 - Devonport Dockyard No.19

A small train dwarfs its engine

I stumbled upon this survivor quite by accident. It was at the Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway. I'd had a good poke around the Big Pit mining museum and heard the steam trains were running that day so went to have a look. The station building is a new one incorporating bits of old ones nearby and when I came on the platform I was promised a train was on its way.

We soon began to hear one approaching. It got nearer and nearer and noisier and noisier but there wasn't even a puff of smoke on the horizon. I checked for loudspeakers but the station staff were guileless creatures and kept nodding to the distant valley, saying, "It'll be here soon."

On and on it came but still there was no visual sign of it.

"Is it a ghost train?" I asked and they roared with laughter.

"Nobody's ever asked that before," said the station master, "but I can see what you mean."

Five minutes later and it's nearly here

Then a coach came round the bend and if you looked carefully in front of it there was a small tak engine working hard.

It noisily puffed up to the station and my jaw dropped.

Only a few days before I'd been on a tour of the historic buildings in Devonport Dockyard and now here was No.19 of the dockyard railways working hard in Wales.

All the way from Devonport

This little engine used to work on the Bodmin & Wenford Railway where it sported a startlingly green coat of paint but is now in this more pleasant shade of maroon. It was built by Bagnalls in 1950 (works number 2962) and is the sole survivor from the dockyard fleet of steam engines. There are still several miles of track around the docks in Devonport and a couple of bright yellow diesels called Henry and Dennis but in odd corners there are isolated pieces of trackwork that illustrate how widespread the system once was.

Paul Burkhalter has written the definitive history and a very interesting read it is, as it traces the development of the docks as well as the railway.

This little engine was preserved by Dave Fouracre in 1968 and it's now owned by his family.

It was good to see it at work in Wales. I was able to tell the staff on the Aberavon and Pontypool Railway.

It maybe small but you wouldn't want to argue with it on a level crossing

I told the proud staff that I'd come up from Cornwall and just been round Devonport's heritage site."You should've looked after it better," they replied. It wasn't me that scrapped the dockyard railway! Cheeky gits.

Whisper it - all along, there was a diesel pushing the two coaches from behind. While a perfect size for squeezing round the sheds in Devonport Dockyard with a few trucks, two full coaches of tourists are more than enough for this locomotive on the gradients around Blaenavon.

Little industrial engines may easy to preserve but they're just not quite big enough to haul much on preserved railways.