You have to admire the dedication of that guy. Bravo Bed Upreti!

Maybe a daft question, but did the Luftwaffe ever adopt yellow lines as a means of getting closer to allied fighters?

Perhaps a bit ungentlemanly, but I recall that the Nazis quickly copied some sort of (pink?) indicator flares dropped before bombing raids, to encourage the RAF to bomb the wrong area. It think might have been mentioned in a biography of Guy Gibson? I’ve also read about a shot up B17 lowering the undercarriage as a symbol of defeat (a standard practice?), only to robustly open fire on the Luftwaffe pilots that went alongside to check.

In Scotland we have the outdoor access code, so in theory you might have a bit more freedom to walk around disused airfields. This is outwith OP’s geographical remit though….

Rumours of a Gloster Meteor F1 EE221 (one of the ones used by Power Jets at Brunty for engine development and the first jet flown by Whittle (he wasn’t supposed to though, believe he got in a bit of hot water for it)) somewhere on or around the Bruntingthorpe site, sounds pretty convincing as well.

This seems to be one of the most fantastic claims in this thread, which admittedly I’ve been enjoying trawling back through! I appreciate that this post is ten years old, and Rlangham hasn’t posted on here in a while, but this claim seems extreme even by the standards of this thread. I can’t dredge much info on the Meteor in question, but surely an early Meteor like this couldn’t be hiding somewhere around Bruntingthorpe?! Especially with that provenance?

Perhaps worth reflecting that this thread is now eleven years old. Whatever is still out there, dumped down mine shafts and buried in quarries, has been corroding steadily all this time. :p

I tried to do a bit of sleuthing a couple of years back into the supposed whereabouts of a chunk of TSR-2 XR219. For those out the loop, XR219 is the only example which flew. The myth/legend/nonsense has all the critical parts to ‘work’. XR219 went to Shoeburyness and was used for all sorts of ballistics experiments. From here the trail basically goes cold. It is known that there were bits of TSR-2 on Shoeburyness into the 1990s. It also seems likely that Hanningfield metals scrapped anything that the MOD removed from the ranges there, and at some point they had a big clean of up the area.

The shaggy dog story hypothesises that the gutted, yet still extant, remains of XR219 were heisted out of the scrap yard somehow. A private collector went as far as advertising, or appealing for, TSR-2 parts in the late ’90s to finish off XR219. However it seems more likely that this guy was a con artist simply trying to build up a collection of TSR-2 parts. My sleuthing also indicated that John Hallett maybe had a hand it heisting away TSR-2 panels, but again I have no evidence for this simply 2nd hand opinion. I suppose that if the story has any ‘legs’ then the owner of the cockpit collection at Rayleigh might have a hand in it? As far as I know he kept some cockpits on Foulness island for a while, in an area also stocked with TSR-2 parts? I could be totally wrong here?

Conversely I don’t see Hanningfield messing up something as sensitive as contaminated scrap from the Shoebury ranges, especially if it was removed at a time when the TSR-2 was still politically sensitive. I suppose that this myth was given the perfect conditions in which to cultivate. A lot of TSR-2 material did go into hiding (as such) over time. There are wee bits of TSR-2, and related material, in a number of museums. In the BBC documentary on the TSR-2, the chap they interview at Shoeburyness plays down the quantity of TSR-2 material on site.

Plus, many see the TSR-2 story as an allegory for the UK’s aviation manufacturing industry as a whole. It is easier to believe that we were just about to produce the most advanced, versatile aircraft ever seen (which would still be used today!), rather than accept that we had been in a slow decline since WW2. The TSR-2 would have been everything in an aircraft, but it was killed off by meddling, gutless civil servants. End of. Plus, TSR-2 fanatics are right up there with EE Lightning fanatics, Vulcan fanatics (and just a few rungs above VC-10 fanatics) in terms of sheer dogmatic, one-sided and delusional opinion. :applause:

Oddly enough Canadians have a very similar story about their pointy white wonder; The Arrow. Apparently one was saved from the scrapman and was flown either to the UK or somewhere in Canada under great secrecy. Some Arrow bang seats turned up in the UK, which got the rumourmongers salivating a few years ago.

Hello Mothminor! Thanks for the heads up. Lets hope they don’t re-open the Waverley Route, or that 26 will have to go on another journey. :highly_amused: I did a bit of digging into the likelihood of the Waverley Route being reinstated a while back, via a contact in Transport Scotland, and the message was basically ‘never say never, but there is a lot of things in the way at the Tweedbank end of the Borders line’.

Thanks, bazv, for clearing that up. I’m surprised that there were two separate heritage railway projects in Methil of all places! It seems that 26040 was stored at the back of Barclay Bros’ yard, boxed in on a very short length of track behind various commercial vehicles.

I’m drifting the thread slightly, but there is a small cache of completely unrestored Andrew Barclay tank engines in Kirkcaldy, which you can see here:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@56.1195563,-3.1565888,3a,60y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s7hZ1fS2oJVLyisS1HY-lTQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

You get a glimpse of them from the railway if you are heading North.

I understand that the scrap metal yard they belong to is full of all sorts of vehicles of all ages, including some military items. I’ve seen one post about it online, but (from memory) it was coming from a commercial vehicle/urbex angle. I wonder sometimes if there is anything aviation-related within the yard.