Trust you to come out with an aerial pic of the entrance DB, very cool, the other shots of the current state of the base from REF are very sad, we couldn’t bear going to Norfolk for our hols this year as it would have been too quiet.
Were all 44 or rather 88, BoB class nameplates presented to the RAF then when the locos were withdrawn in the 60’s, less ‘Winston Churchill’ as it’s at York, and if so, where are they all now.
I looked up a previous thread and saw a picture of 6 of them on display at RAF Bentley Priory including what must be the other Hurricane nameplate.
I know that some of these loco’s are running in preservation, in fact, for the summer, ‘Tangmere’ is being disguised as ‘Spitfire’ in conjunction with the Shepherd Neame brewery, but I bet all these plates they carry now are replicas, they are too precious to tempt the screwdriver brigade.
Certainly on the line on which I worked as a volunteer for many years the nameplates were changed for replicas in normal day-to-day use quite a few years back now. Don’t forget that the majority of preserved BoBs came via Barry scrapyard in any case and thus had no non-ferrous fittings left of any nature, let alone nameplates, when they passed into preservation, indeed many had even lost their tenders and consisted of little more than frames, wheelsets, cylinder castings and boilers. ‘Winston Churchill’ (1965) and ‘Blackmoor Vale/Blackmore Vale’ (1967) were the only two Bullied light pacifics to pass directly into preservation.
Where the nameplates went is an interesting question and one worthy of further research. One suspects that the usual thing happened – some were presented by BR, others were claimed by what was then the Museum of British Transport, a lot of others were sold off by BR (officially and unofficially) and a few were pinched. I am pretty sure that I recall seeing quantities of BoB plates in the national collection initially at Clapham and later in York and also at the Canadian National Railway Museum.
For the record the following BoBs have been preserved: 21C151/34051 ‘Winston Churchill’; 21C153/34053 ‘Sir Keith Park’; 21C158/34058 ‘Sir Frederick Pile’; 21C159/34059 ‘Sir Archibald Sinclair’; 21C167/34067 ‘Tangmere’; 21C170/34070 ‘Manston’; 34072 ‘257 Squadron’; 34073 ‘249 Squadron’; and 34081 ’92 Squadron’
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