Seemed useful to have a general purpose thread for this most quintessential breed of engines.
A snippet from the local paper: the Padarn Lake Railway's "
Tomos Bach" has recently been renamed "
Wild Aster", the name it carried for much of its service at Dinorwic.
I had seen the loco with its new/original name a couple of weeks back and put it down to my imagination running wild, but the photo in the newspaper proves it!
Here's a pic before the renaming and still with the cab:
🔗Llanberis-2-User-Album-Image-38458[linkphoto]Llanberis-2-User-Album-Image-38458[/linkphoto][/link]
The newspaper article also suggests that the cab will be removed for the "summer" season, returning it to a much more authentic look, although it probably needs that blue paint covering up with black and a couple of blocks of wood nailing to the buffer beams... 😉
For the record,
Wild Aster was no.849, built in 1904 for the Dinorwic Quarry. It was sold to the Padarn lake Railway in 1969, but did not run until 1988, almost three decades after it had last worked.
It originally carried No.7 but was renamed
Wild Aster following the tradition of naming locos after racehorses.
Hello again darkness, my old friend...