Well thats it - 24 months of my grandfathers working life. One of the things that I found frightening as I went through it was how few days he had off. He averaged 5 days off month in 1952 and 6 days a month in 1953. Given the sort of work he was doing he must have beena fit man. I'm not sure that I would have been able to keep up that as a work schedule - have we become too soft? And did he ever get bored of going between Brent Yard and Toton?

In the two years (putting aside that the many of the relief, disposing and shed turns don't record the locos he worked on) he worked on 325 different locos. These included 192 different 8Fs (about a third of the class), 63 4Fs, 34 3Fs, 18 Garratts, eight Crabs, seven Jintys, four 4Ps, three Super Ds, two each of Johnson 2Ps, Ivatt 4Fs, Jubilees and a single example of an Ivatt 2MT, Ivatt 2F, Johnson 1P and a Standard 4. Unsurprisingly the loco he worked on the most was Wellingborough's own 8F 48699 which he fired 16 times over the two years. This was followed by Garratt 47982 which he worked 11 times.

To me there are three stand out turns from the everyday ones. The first 16th September 1952 when he took the Jubilee 45649 HAWKINS light engine to Derby. The second involves another Jubilee when on 18th November 1953 he took 45726 VINDICTIVE on a Preston to London train (I assume that this was a passenger train). The third is possibly the most interesting of all, when on 13th October 1953 he took Standard 4 75040 from Bedford to Leicester. Nothing especially out of the ordinary about this other than the loco was delivered new to Bedford on 31st August so it was an almost brand new loco. He doesn't appear to have a training course on how to operate it (unless that run was the training course!)

Thank you for reading and I hope that you have found the information contained in these posts either interesting or even better useful.

Cheers

Simon