LOCAL LOCO TRIALS 1931 STYLE
Any casual lineside observers on September 9, 1931 at Chellaston (some four miles from Derby on the Midland Railway Ashby-de-la-Zouch line) would have been puzzled to see a short stopping train call at their wayside station and then start away again. The same thing would happen another 13 times that day and then 18 times on each of the next two consecutive days.
Our observers’ mystification would stem from the fact local services between Derby and Melbourne serving the two intermediate stations of Peartree & Normanton and Chellaston had been withdrawn the previous September. Had the service been reinstated without any publicity perhaps? Regrettably not.
Onlookers with a trained eye would have remarked the train featured a diminutive former Midland & Great Northern (M&GN) 4-4-0 tank engine on two strange six-wheeled vehicles, being replaced on the next day by a more familiar Midland Railway Class 2228 0-4-4T hauling three bogie coaches. The third day would have been even more perplexing when the M&GN loco turned up with accommodation that amounted to just two four-wheeled vehicles. Anyone encountering this latter combination after dark might well have gone home claiming to have seen a ghost train!
Of course, the truth was more prosaic than the speculation. The three-day reappearance of the Derby to Melbourne stopping trains was conducted without passengers as an experiment by the chief mechanical & electrical engineer’s (CM & EE) department ‘to determine what saving in fuel can be obtained by reducing the weight of engines and trains used for local services’. Readers are invited to consider whether it did anything of the kind. The September 1931 report was donated to the Railway Studies’ Collection of Newton Abbot Library (in this modern world aka the Passmore Edwards Centre) having been donated by Derby railway engineer Godfrey Yeomans. After featuring a similar report on Scunthorpe to South Wales steel trains via Woodford Halse, I was fascinated to learn what this 88-year-old discovery might have to say.
