THE MOORS’ SWEETHEART

Just before 4pm on June 2, 1998, War Department 2-10-0 No. 3672 Dame Vera Lynn rolled to a gentle halt in Pickering station on the North YorkshireMoors Railway, with a banner stretched across the track in front of it reading ‘100,000 miles not out’.

This wartime workhorse had just set a heritage railway record. At 3.56pm, as it passed milepost 7 on the approach to the station, it had become the first steam locomotive to clock up 100,000 miles in preservation.

At that figure, your car would be due for a very major service – if you didn’t simply throw it onto the scrap heap. Of course, the NYMR has no intention of doing the latter with Dame Vera Lynn – but it needs your help to fund the heavy overhaul that the locomotive requires if it is to return to steam in 2024/25, tomark its 80th birthday and the same anniversary of VE Day.

Popular performer

Many locomotives become synonymous with the railways where they have resided for decades – but others become inextricably linked with a particular era of that railway’s history. Dame Vera Lynn is a classic example of the latter. Think of the NYMR in the 1990s, and it is one of the engines that springs instantly tomind.

Powerful enough to take the steep gradients and the heaviest trains in its stride at this major tourist attraction, and providing the perfect period set-piece for its hugely popular wartime weekends, it’s no surprise that the ‘Dub-Dee’ was such a prolific performer at that time.

Yet racking up 100,000 miles in the space of one 10-year boiler certificate was but the latest milestone, and a relatively brief interlude, in the story of an engine that had already travelled widely before it arrived at the NYMR.

Named after the famous singer and entertainer known as ‘the Forces’ Sweetheart’, No. 3672 has, in preservation, become something of a symbol to commemorate the railways’ role in the Second WorldWar. Yet, although Robert Riddles’WDAusterity 2-8-0s and 2-10-0s were designed and built for the war effort, this particular example seems to have played relatively little part in it.

“I’d love to find out if it didwork in Egypt… we can’t find any record of it being used.”

Constructed by North British of Glasgow in 1944 and renumbered 73672 within months, it and 15 of its classmates were sent to Egypt