The steam engine Galatea broke last Thursday’s trip on the Settle and Carlisle line with a water-stop at Appleby. This gave passengers a chance to stretch their legs and admire one of the prettiest stations on the route.
The tributes paid there to the great railway photographer Bishop Eric Treacy were heart-warming to see. He died on the station in 1978 while waiting for a rail tour. This was hauled, appropriately, by Evening Star.
His name was well known to me as a boy. It appeared in railway magazines beneath so many stirring portraits of the Gresley pacifics — streamlined A4s like Mallard especially — which supplied a thrilling daily sight for me on the tracks.
His concern, as befits one of his calling, was with the human dimension to railways. He was proud Pastor to Railwaymen.
In his 1969 book The Glory of Steam he writes of the men who did “their wonderful bit” with steam and “whose weather-beaten and cheerful faces we no longer see stuck out of the cabside”.
In fact, as a glance at the photograph above demonstrates, the type still exists, if they are not always weather-beaten. But when, I wonder, shall we see women on the footplate?
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