A day to remember

Firstly a big thank you, from the team, to everyone for coming along to the County day yesterday.

The day was a great success and attracted a lot of interest both at the time and subsequently online.

Here is a gallery of photos from the day. Others will follow especially if anyone would like to contribute photos from the day we will happily showcase them.

The day was to showcase progress to date while also acknowledging that there is still a considerable amount to do and to set a further funding target of £150,000 to get the job done.

This may seem like a lot especially given the visual completeness presented yesterday but there is still a lot of work to do, and components to be procured, including all the non-ferrous backhead (cab) fittings, and the tubes for the boiler which is probably the most expensive consumable component on a locomotive. (To put it into perspective, the late, great, David Shepherd told me in 2004 that the retubing of Black Prince had cost him more in real terms than the purchase price of the whole loco from BR. Material prices have only gone up since then.)

We are, however, still helped by the standardisation policy of the GWR and recently an ejector casting was found in the stores at Didcot which is suitable for the County which will save us a good amount of money.

So we would be grateful for any donations you can give (link here) and if you have basic practicality skills and would like to join the team please also get in touch. The two things which dictate the speed with which we see a Hawksworth County in steam is, as always, funds and people.

One great aspect of taking the County onto the turntable yesterday was the opportunity to capture two Hawksworth products in one shot, gas turbine 18000 of course being a project initiated during his tenure as CME.

In a later post I will discuss in a bit more detail the speeches made by Richard Croucher, Hon. Treasurer for the County, and John Buxton who originally developed the idea for the County creation, but I include these two photos which includes John handing over a cheque for £500 to kickstart the final push for the County. Please do consider doing the same- donations big and small all add up to the final 2 cylinder 4-6-0.

And finally, by chance I found a bush to hide the missing bits. Squint enough and it looks like a complete County!