Hi all,
I might have sent this one out a long time ago so here’s one for the younger recipients of these pictures I have taken who might like to see and pure nostalgia for the few who are left to remember..
These were the conditions we had to work in during steam days. By then 3 sheds roof had been taken off before it fell onto someone. So we got soaked during heavy rain as engine cleaners not that we did much in that line but we were employed on other tasks until we reached the ripe old age of 16 and then we went firing the engines after passing out. I finished up in trip link B as my age stopped me going into my correct place in a higher link on the main line until I was 18.Not that made much different if there was shortage of staff. I was put with an old driver of 64 named Harold Godfrey who had one year left before retirement. Harold had started on the railway in 1912 also as a cleaner but in those days the engines were cleaned to perfection, a clean rag would be run over every part by the foreman cleaner. Wo betide any one who had left a speck! Anyway this man did not taking prisoners he had been brought up on the job during very hard times. When he became a fireman he was with some drivers who had started around the 1870s, second generation footplatemen some tough characters indeed. On my first day I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not to fire left handed on his side of the cab and to keep it nice and clean and from that day even on diesels l always carried my own brush.
But I digress. Here are 3 9Fs, standing round the turntable, aren’t they in a sorry state, the left hand engine 92204 was for a short time a Saltley engine before going off to Tyseley. The middle one number not known looks as if it was receiving a washout to the boiler that would be carried out by Lenny the lion and his assistant who were both always filthy dirty and soaking wet from leaking water pipes. The right hand one 92104 was an 8H engine from Birkenhead, a most unusual visitor.
So there we are it’s all now a trading estate with the new HS 2 year railway passing near by. Progress.
Regards
Ledg.

Sent from my iPad