The ancient cathedral cities of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester had and have a great deal in common. Not least is some fine architecture – Hereford station is not, perhaps the grandest, but it's a fine piece of well proportioned mid-Victoriana. There is the Three Choirs Festival, shared in rotation between the three cathdrals. Then although covering a much shorter time span, but definitely historial, is the fact that, in the steam era each had depots where former Great Western Railway and London Midland & Scottish Railway locomotives could be found in residence. And that meant, when I first knew them in the 1950s, many designs dating back to pre-grouping days. The LMS ones were from the London & North Western, Midland and, perhaps surprisingly, Lancashire & Yorkshire Railways whilst, as far as the GWR was concerned, the odd survivor of one of the South Wales companies taken over in 1922/3 could sometimes be found, as well as lots and lots of its own pre-1923 examples.
Hereford was the city I knew best, having been invited by the Royal Air Force to take up residence at Credenhill in the spring of 1956, a short bus ride to the west out in the country, not a million miles from the Welsh border, where raw recruits were refashioned into highly skilled, or, realistically lowering expectations, reasonably competent clerk/typists.
I had known Hereford before that and one of my favourite journeys, anywhere, has always been the joint GWR/LMS line from Shrewsbury to Hereford, through the Marches, with the Welsh mountains to the west and the rolling Shropshire hills all around. In steam days motive power might have been anything: ‘King’, ‘Castle’ or ‘Royal Scot’, to a Stanier Class
