The BeerTrain

The Pompey's had finished in May of this year, since then my weekends had been spent leaping around the country scratching locos. I couldn't yet face spending my days between Waterloo & Salisbury on a succession of class 33/1 "Bagpipes", the only booked Crompton diagrams left.  I would return South every Saturday night, however, to cover the 0330 class 33/1 overnight out of Waterloo to Portsmouth which was then booked back up to Waterloo then out to Salisbury. This kept my Crompton mileage ticking over. It was now time for some Annual Leave & an All Line Rover. # = Required Loco or Unit for haulage. Friday 22/07/88 1535# / 1536# / 1590  Sittingbourne - London Victoria 44m 59ch HST  St.Pancras - Leicester 99m 47373 Leicester - Nuneaton 1M22 1840 Skegness - Nuneaton 19m 12ch 156 417# Nuneaton - Birmingham New Street 21m 08ch A poor start, the Skeg - Nuneaton was booked a pair of class 20's NOT a dud slow speed fitted Knottingley class 47! Saturday 23/07/88 4...

I was sat at home one evening, after work at the Smeed Dean Brickworks in Sittingbourne, watching ANOTHER re-run of an original Star Trek episode while my Mum got on with her ironing (I say her ironing as no-one else was going to do it!) when the house phone rang. "Hello it's Eric Tyler from Templecombe station, we've already got enough bookings for the Crompton Farewell train on October 22nd to more than half fill another train. What do you think?" What I immediately thought was how did he get my number, I don't work for the railway & my booking for the Farewell was as part of a block booking made by someone else?! Anyway my obvious reply was to suggest running a 2nd train the following Saturday - after all that's double mileage for all of us! "How can we guarantee that we don't get the same locos both weeks, or make it so people want to do a 2nd trip?" Eric & Gerald Daniels (Salisbury Area Manager) were  responsible for planning these t...