Good news – the very popular visit by GER 229 is set to be repeated later this year.  The locomotive will leave Beamish after it concludes its Easter spell of running on Sunday 19th April, and is set to visit other railways in the following weeks.  It will then return to Beamish in mid-July to provide motive power at Rowley on the North Eastern Branch through July and August – enabling us to mark the station’s 50th anniversary since reopening at the museum with an appropriate locomotive in the platform.

Below: The locomotive is still in a running-in period, and due to lineside fires was out of steam on the 10th April in order for a spark arrestor to be fitted.  It also ran late on a previous occasion as the gauge glasses required attention to their rubber seals.  This was corrected the same day and the train service was able to operate during the afternoon.  Dave Hewitt sent these two images of 229 looking superb in the spring sunshine during the first week of operation on the North Eastern Branch at Rowley.

Below: As an interim measure to disrupt the potential to eject sparks of unburnt coal from the chimney (that can be one source of ignition for dry lineside vegetation), the original birds-nest spark arrestor that was fitted to our Manning Wardle ‘Newcastle’ during its operating career on the Wissington Light Railway was retrieved from the weeds and made suitable to fit 229.  The locomotives at Wissington were all fitted with these devices, as they operated across fenland where the sugar beet was grown that formed the staple traffic on the railway.  When Newcastle was purchased for preservation and returned to its as-built condition by then owner Gordon Wells, the spark arrestor was removed, but retained in store.  This ensured that it was able to be included in the sale of the locomotive to Beamish in 2012.   This view shows the arrestor fitted to GER 229, which will carry it for the remainder of the Easter holiday period.

Below: As luck would have it, as soon as the arrestor was fitted, it rained!  GER 229 is captured departing Rowley on the 11th April.

Photographs in this post by Dave Hewitt and Paul Jarman