Join us for a day of steam action featuring BR-liveried No.4110 on four chocolate and cream coaches

We are delighted to announce a return to the Paignton & Dartmouth Steam Railway in Devon for a full day photographing ‘5101’ Class 2-6-2T No.4110. The locomotive will be returning to the line for next season following a three-year hire to the East Somerset Railway. By then, we expect the locomotive, currently in unlined British Railways green livery, to have been fully lined out which should set off the Large Prairie perfectly. It will be paired with four chocolate and cream coaches which is totally authentic and should look excellent on this former Western Region branch line.

Our charter will start from Paignton Station and travel will be by train throughout. In order to make the most of the photographic locations available, it is likely that we will turn the locomotive during the day. We are negotiating to regain access to some locations that we have not visited for a couple of years, in addition to including some of our favourite regular vantage points.

Should bookings go very well, we will consider running an additional day on the Sunday before this charter, but will only do so if sufficient interest is forthcoming for the Monday. No.4110 is a Large Prairie of the 5101 Class which was completed at Swindon Works in 1936. Its initial posting was to Severn Tunnel Junction for banking heavy goods trains. After just a couple of months, it was transferred to Wolverhampton in the West Midlands where it would largely be based for more than two decades. It was employed on local workings around Warwickshire from Birmingham’s Snow Hill and Moor Street stations, working to such destinations as Royal Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon. No.4110 enjoyed a brief twelve-month sojourn at Birkenhead before returning to the Midlands. 

After the Second World War, the locomotive had many allocations, including to Wellington and Stourbridge in the Midlands and to Neath in Wales, where it worked the last train on the Vale of Neath line to Pontypool Road in June 1964. Its last allocation for Western Region was back at Severn Tunnel Junction and withdrawal came in June 1965. A resident of Barry Scrapyard for nearly fifteen years, No.5101 became the 100th locomotive to leave Barry and, after going through a number of owning groups, was purchased by the Paignton & Dartmouth Railway in 2018-19.