The Deltic

Before we get into the big engine, here’s the idyllic scene a couple of days ago just outside the Wansford railway station, on the Nene Valley Railway near Peterborough:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 16mm, 1/250 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. That’s the River Nene. Idle snap with the wide angle Sigma, and rather heavily tweaked in Lightroom and Paint Shop pro to produce a very quick and simple HDR effect. But no amount of photo processing could adequately convey just how lovely a day it was. I’d managed to get away from the office a few hours early one Friday afternoon in July 2009, craving fresh air, sunshine and a warm breeze after a week’s heavy lifting of a few golf industry marketing plans. Leaving Marie and her parents happily (honestly) building baby bedroom furniture, I headed to the NVR where I’d heard our favourite train (me and my big brother – mild trainspotting tendencies having been covered elsewhere in this blog) was going to be running up and down the line for ‘enthusiasts’.

The Deltic was the biggest, most powerful diesel engine ever to run on British Rail. Only 22 were ever made, and they ran up and down the East Coast main line between London and Edinburgh, just the most mighty trains imaginable with distinctive, bulbous noses and making a throbbing, pulsating growl that got you in the chest like the noise of a thousand sub-woofers. Mark and I loved them as much for the how they sounded, as for how they looked. The Deltics were the closest we ever came, in Britain, to the giant freight-pulling monster engines they have in the USA. Seeing one up close, for a small boy, was one of the biggest thrills you could have in the pre-CGI, pre-internet, pre-video game late Sixties and Seventies.

Sadly, on this day, D9009 Alycidon failed to live up to the legend, and by the time I got there the enthusiasts had drifted away, thwarted by ‘operational difficulties’, which I took to mean that this notably temperamental beast had simply broken down a bit. Either that, or they didn’t sell enough tickets:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/400 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Brutalised slightly in Lightroom, to produce a slightly over the top HDR effect, but hey this is only a little photo blog and I like to make the pictures pop a bit. Here’s the Deltic anyway, parked in the crowded NVR marshalling yard, next to your actual Thomas The Tank Engine. The Deltic is so big and beefy, with such a huge snout, you have to get a fair way away from it if you’re taking pictures at ground level. I probably shouldn’t have been down in the dirt and cinders of the yard, but it was pretty much deserted so I took the photographer’s chance, and walked around unhindered.

Here’s the one from the footbridge:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 48mm, 1/200 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Various colour channels de-saturated in Lightroom to pop the greens and yellows. There’s not an awful lot one can write about this picture – my brother Mark will probably appreciate why I took it, in fact why I was there at all. Like me, he will be wishing that they’d restored it in the Blue & Yellow livery, rather than the old British Rail green. But to us, this picture brings back many happy memories of a childhood now gone, but not forgotten.