Heritage Railway Magazine 253 - 12 April 2019 Edizione posteriore

THE completion of another mission impossible is always a pinnacle of the railway heritage movement, not least of all the realisation of a 45-year dream. For it was back in early1974 that the Great Western Society bought GWR4-6-0No. 4942 Maindy Hall from Barry scrapyard with the intention of back-converting into an example of the extinct forerunner of its type, the Churchward Saint, considered to be the most important steam locomotive design of the early 20th century.

The Saint class in so many ways marked the watershed between the steam locomotives of theVictorian era and the modern world, and it is a tragedy that nobody saw fit to preserve one.

That ship has now been righted. Back then, such an aspiration may well have belonged firmly in the realm of cloud cuckoo land, for there was no standard-gauge new-build project which could act as a blueprint for guidance, even one which drew on the GWR concept of interchangeable components between classes. In 1974, there would still have been people who would have seen the last Saints in BR service before the last four were withdrawn in1953.

In 2019, launched in the month that also marks the 20th anniversary of the first issue of HeritageRailway, Lady of Legend is nothing short of an exciting new window onto an old world, the fabled Edwardian era of City of Truro hitting a purported 102.3mph on Wellington bank and the like. A baby born when the rusting hulk of Maindy Hall reached Didcot would now be well into middle age.