Peter Townend’s remarkable railway career ran for more than 40 years from 1941, starting at Doncaster when he was a premium apprentice and taking him through the drawing office and various motive power depots before he landed at 34A. There, he oversaw 19 ‘A4s’ – including the locomotives for the non-stop ‘Elizabethan’.
Born on August 13 1925, ‘PNT’ (the ‘N’ standing for Norman) was a life-long enthusiast. He remembered, for example, watching with his father the 1935 inaugural trip of the ‘Silver Jubilee’ with Silver Link run through Doncaster.
“It was an incredible moment,” he later said, in the first instalment of a series about his career for Steam World. This epic series charting his remarkable railway career would ultimately run for nearly a year.
Of that day in 1935, Peter said, “There was an eerie silence as everything had stopped moving for several minutes
