THE A1 Steam Locomotive Trust has received the first components for its third new-build project – the £2.5 million Gresley V4 2-6-2 No. 3403, it announced on January 29.
At its Silver Jubilee convention in October 2015, the trust revealed that it would follow its crowd-pulling Peppercorn A1 4-6-2 No. 60163 Tornado and Gresley P2 2-8-2 No. 2007 Prince of Wales with the construction of further extinct LNER types – a Gresley V4, a Gresley V3 2-6-2T and a Gresley K3 2-6-0.
At its annual convention last September, the trust confirmed it had started work identifying and scanning the original drawings for the V4 at the National Railway Museum in York in order to create the design book for the new locomotive in 3D Computer Aided Design software. The trust has since acquired and taken delivery of a complete set of fully-certified tyres for the V4’s pony, Cartazzi and 5ft 8in driving wheels.
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They have been purchased from David Buck, owner of Thompson B1 4-6-0 No. 61306 Mayflower, along with a chimney, two BR Class 08 shunter speedometer drive generators and two two-stage single spindle air pumps of Finnish origin, including lubricator pumps and check valves for use on No. 2007.
The tyres were originally made in South Africa in the late 1990s for Malcolm Barlow, a Doncaster scrap dealer, who launched the Gresley V4 Society in 1994 to build a new example of the class.
David acquired the parts six months ago in a job lot of items that Malcolm had salvaged from Doncaster Works on its closure – including a number of B1 class components.
Gresley designed the V4 for mixed-traffic use and it was his last design for the LNER before he died suddenly in April 1941.
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