British Railways Class 4MT Standard 76017

On its first revenue earning service on the KESR in charge of the Wealden Pullman Sunday Lunch train at Wittersham Road today. The loco is on hire to us for the remainder of the year. This loco was built in 1953 so is only a little older than me and had a short life in service.

The trainee was offering the driver the token for the section from Wittersham to Northiam and preparing to collect the token from Rolvenden to Wittersham. Signalmen need a degree of agility and flexibility to discharge this duty.

An enjoyable day in the box as the trainee knew what he was doing so it was a case of letting him get on with it while I kept a watching brief over his actions.

Mostly everything worked and we finished on time which is always good news. We collected our soup and bread roll from the onboard catering staff as they passed by. Delivered in a similar way to those mailbags on the Travelking Post Office.

The only fly in the ointment was a recalcitrant up home signal which refused to go back to danger. The cableways are choked with brambles and the cable pulley posts have fallen over so restricting movement. A judicial yank on the cable along the embankment resolved the problem each time we needed to use that signal.

We reported the fault, which happened to be the same fault as was reported on 29th December and 23rd December. Perhaps it will get fixed soon