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Vintage railway film - Scrapping the old iron horses - British Pathe - 1961
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- čas přidán 25. 12. 2023
- This vintage railway film, produced in 1961 and from the British Pathe website, details the demise of steam locomotives in the UK.
I remember seeing a picture taken in 1957 that summed it up well. It was of locomotive #701, on its last run on the Ontario Northland Railway, and it had a sign on it that said: Farewell to steam, victim of progress. On the upside some farsighted people on both sides of the Atlantic, and other places in the world had the foresight to save a few of them. A small number of them are even in working order.
Sad to see them destroyed. All the amazingly difficult work that went into them needs to be appreciated.
Say that to the labourers who made them under horrible conditions while the bosses got rich off their backs. The metal doesn't need to be praised, the workers do...
you can't save on everything, it would be too expensive and difficult, it also has to be maintained
It has long been practice to scrap locomotives that had reached the end of their servicable lives. However, British Railways' decision to discontinue using steam traction in 1968 has often been thought as political, considering that the last engines had only left the production line eight years before.
Yeah well now they're overrun with terrorists and getting arrested for visiting the wrong news websites so I guess it all evens out.
Much like the coal mines - they never ran out of coal. It was a political decision.
Considering dieselization happened in America starting in the 40s, I'm more shocked how far behind the curve Europe was in terms of train technology
Look how far ahead Europe is now
@@JordosGarage Not in freight, but you're right, they picked up the slack and then surpassed america
The material they were built from is not going to waste. It is sad to see these machines being dismantled but is there anything that is truly permanent?
Change is the only constant.
Britain went diesel at that time, and the deltics were fast. By the way steam is not gone away. Several projects in the US are reviving the steam locs and several projects in britain building them new from blueprints.
@@rudolfmouthaan7892 But no more steam trains that are run on fossil fuels, not on any public routes that transport normal travel or freight routes.
They'd be worth a fortune today.
They are, or what was salvaged from them. Loco number, Cab sides with number, shed plate and all the other 'plates' are worth more today than the engine was worth in scrap metal.
Very interesting to watch this a second time round with the mixed emotions of the first time and now when we see what can only be described as the industry of preservation and the heritage lines around Britain and beyond we just can't let these pieces of history disappear can we?
With 2023 celebrating the centenary of Flying Scotsman and new locomotives being built we have a whole new generation of boys and girls that enjoy nothing more than a day on a steam train.
Long live the Raven glass and Eskdale also the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch who never did let steam die, resurgence in the narrow gauge sectors and so on, fantastic!
I watched this film back in the day with the same sad heart that I watched mighty battleships being broken up, that really really was a sad sight.
Long live our British (and the rest of the world's) industrial heritage, it's great for all ages and fantastic education for the uninformed.
0:54 "being converted into scrap" What a British way of phrasing it. 😀
It is a shame that a lot of classes never got preserved
We need to build replicas
they wernt intrested mate when amachine come to the end of it usefull life its so much scrap The funney thing about cutting up locosthe gas is worth more than the metal .DIE WOODHAM could not make it pay!!!°ttfn&ty
There is an N7 locomotive preserved
You're, like me , an enthusiast, but sadly, we are a minority. I learnt from working on preserving road based transport here in ireland that not every scrap vehicle is in condition whereby it can be preserved. Who would pay for all this, too . As far as i can read, preservation groups are put to the pin of their collar trying to preserve the steam locomotives they have , never mind build more .
The place that helped steam preservation groups the most was , ironically, a scrapyard, Woodham Bros. scrapyard Barry, Wales, and its later owner Dai Woodham . Even though Dai Woodham said it was never his intention to do so , freight wagons were easier to scrap and kept his men at work. Locomotives only had the torch put through them when there were no wagons to scrap. 293 locomotives went into woodham bros yard, and 213 were preserved . The most famous one to return to the rails from woodhams was the hogwarts express in the Harry Potter films .
Scrapyards also provide parts to keep whats already been preserved running too.
Well there aren’t any surviving BR standard 6s
But its a standard so it might not be that hard to make
There are a number of new build projects in place, some of which are intended to replicate lost classes. However, the more pressing need is that our existing preserved stock will soon be coming to the end of its operational life. Even the youngest are now over 60 years old.
I can almost taste the asbestos in the air
apparently 12K locos were scapped over a 10 year period. Numerous businesses sprung up, what they wanted was the brass heart which was worth more than all that iron. It took a week for three men to cut up a loco.
Only small amounts of brass. A lot had copper fireboxes!
Stratford works closed in 1962. I remember the last old steam locos in 1968/69.
Neat at 3:28 we see a North American style "Frisco" boxcar in a British documentary on the scrapping of steam locomotives.
This is a composite of different films from both the UK and America. They were set on fire to burn the wood interiors. They only wanted the steel shells.
It would be nice to have some of the old gauges.
They are worth a fortune today
Lots of them appear on Ebay every week, the same gages used on engines were used on ships and building boilers, made by Ashcroft, Crosby, American Gage, and many others. I own a number of them from small to 14" diameter with brass cases and dials, but I dont remember any of them costing more than $400 even for the large two
@@HobbyOrganist I have seen a great many cost terrifically more, but for a specific model to complete a restoration. Gauges only desirable for looks, not function or correctness are less valuable and can be found on consumer sites like ebay inexpensively.
I noticed the engineer who ran steam for 20 years switch over to the new locomotive style he looked so depressed
He's Old School British. Probably embarrassed to be on camera.
Al Smith
It is a shame what has happened to Britain.
What do you mean? They built better trains and had to scrap the old ones. Britain’s economy needed this after the war
It's happened all over, especially here in the USA. It's always welcome to see them preserved.
They were inefficient, dirty, and took hours to get started. Other countries had been electric many years earlier. Steam is evocative and beautiful, but ancient technology.
Steam was better
@@Chillaxin202 no it wasn’t
As a grown man, this brought me to tears. Yes, silly i know . :(
Easy to be sentimental about these but i used to work with an old engine driver and he couldnt wait to get off them onto a new "clean" diesel, he didnt miss the steam engines one bit, filthy, dirty, noisy bastard things i think was the quote he used lol
the narrator is being a savage to train spotters lol
1:16 i know sometime somewhere on earth there was a train with the number 69420 on it
its probably in a pub or someone’s basement
It started here and has been the continuing legacy we find ourselves in today, may we rot in hell for this tragedy.........
Saddo .. Oh lets just keep EVERYTHING then ..not bother to reuse the metal .. Keep using resources producing more stuff , whilst all the existing stuff is just left to rot in fields / all over .. not able to be recycled/reused ..because it makes you cry boo hoo ..... oooo the tragedy of reusing metal from old outdated stuff ... give your head a shake you sad melt ...
Can you imagine the shithole the country would be if we never got rid of our old outdated stuff .. Old cars , , ships trains just dumped here there and everywhere.. rubbish piled high .. The RAF still using Sopwith Camels, Spitfires and whatever else they used .. because ..hey ho .. why not still use them becaue ..YOU get sad with progress and the need to clear out old tech ......such a tragedy eh ..
Sorry to see it happening - like killing a unicorn - but it's historically very interesting. In a way, it's surprising that these bits of Victorian or Georgian technology lasted so long. By the time this was filmed, we were in the space age, but the Victorian era was still in living memory.
If it hadn't been for WWII they would have been scrapped sooner. In the USA General Motors sent their new FT freight diesels around to all railroads in 1939-40 as demonstrators. After 1940 no American railroad wanted to buy any more steam locomotives. But Pearl Harbor changed all of that. Diesel engines were needed in submarines and smaller Navy ships. Railroads were forced to buy their last steam locomotives in 1944. Today these are the ones that were saved, they were only 10 years old when retired.
@dfirth224 I see what you mean. Both world wars really held up these changes. The diesel engine appeared in the 1890s and the first electric locomotive in 1879. By the 1900s, the London metropolitan railway had electric trains, and electric trams were everywhere. The two world wars probably meant there was less money and fewer resources. In continental Europe, most of their railways were smashed up by war, and they had to start again from scratch, but in Britain, less so. There wasn't the money to justify the change until labour to do the dirty maintenance jobs on steam locomotives became too expensive.
@@invisibleman4827 Also, there is the question of natural resources and fuel. Britain has some of the best coal in the world, and plentiful. We lack oil and gas; apart from the North Sea and shale. Coal, at the time was cheaper to mine; but gradually became more expensive. Oil and gas for our navy and transport made us dependant of Russia and the US. Independence in this country requires coal.
@johnmartlew True, true. It held up some technological advances but war efforts kickstart other technological advances. 😊
@peterbray5383 That's true too. Coal was one of the main reasons for Britain's industrial revolution, plenty of abundant fuel easy to get to. In the 1950s however, oil had suddenly become cheaper, allowing for advances for diesel and petrol engines, and the coal industry had been declining for about 40 years.
It's even sadder when you're a Thomas fan seeing brothers of engines dying
"I'm not happy. I keep thinking about the dreadful state of the world. Is it true what the Diesels say? They boast that they've abolished steam!"
Dialogue that can depress any real man.
Any real man doesn't care if the world is powered by steam or diesel anymore...real men want the world to be livable in the future, and the future is renewable.
Amazing that China's last steam loco was built in 2000 and the abundance of coal in some areas actually made it cheaper to operate than diesels around that time.
And because of their cheap coal, they're still building coal fueled power stations while we have to resort to renewable fuels. No wonder Temu products are so cheap.
And polluting the world worse than most other nations combined. One day they will pay for the damage they have done to the planet, but not until it gets worse.
Солидарна, китай хитрый, плохо себе не сделает точно
@@nobodynoone2500 You do know that the UK and the USA have polluted much more than China...just that they did it over 300 years while they exploited and prevented China from industrilizing...search for total historical CO2 emissions by country! Per citizen the UK have emitted 1100 tons of CO2, for china that is 180 tons...for the USA it is 1300 tons!....And people today blame China when Europe and the USA stands for more than 60% of all historical emissions! China stands for 14%, or less than a quarter of what Europe and the US have spewed into the atmosphere.
Steam locomotives were used till the end of the GDR. The era finally ended with the reunification of Germany. I remember passing the place were the locomotives were collected in the early 90s.
Did anyone notice the jokes at the beginning here? Signaling, while disappearing indoor. The worker standing between locomotives, when one rolls in.
Now find a use for EV batteries when they die, as fast as you recycled the railroads.
Except for the EV lithium batteries, which die in a fire and are so difficult to put out most firefighters drag them off to a safe spot and let them burn.
Interesting film 👍🙂
Such nostalgia for yesteryear. But have we made any progress??
Yes tons of progress.
Have we made progress? Well of course we have but I’m so glad I can remember these on the main line.
Not too much in Britain, I’m afraid.
We haven't made much progress since the invention of the host all the train's you see running today are built in the EU or Japan with parts shipped over for reassembly,@@phillipjones3439
Host should say HST and forgot to mention our main freight locos made North America,
I’m i the only one who finds this somewhat satisfying
This is the saddest video I've ever watched. 😢😢😭
You have not watched many videos if you say that, this was fun! New life for those old smelly, inefficient and dangerous husks!
You can feel how sad Al Smith is at the end...
Think of the souvenirs.
When the train caused confusion and delay and Sir Topham was very angry
Sad to see the final position of these engines. 🇬🇧🥲👎🇺🇸
In color!
Is very easy to destroy things, is very hard to build them... Sad.
Ehm, they used the steel to build new things...they didn't just destroy them...
Grandpa's no doubt thinking: there has to be a easier way to make a buck!
Don't forget, only about 8% of the coal actually produces enough heat to produce enough steam to power a steam engine, yes this is a sad film and I regret the many classes that have been lost.
This. It's sad they had to cut them up, but there was just no way to justify keeping them around.
that is true for the most part, but there are ways to bring up the efficentcy of it and they are more robust then diesles, and often easier to repair with lower tech, yes you got to have huge machines to make the parts but its not like you need more percise stuff to work on electros or diesel electros, and the one bonus of steam is if it can generate heat to make steam it can be used for fuel even cleaner burning light oil, liquid natural gas or burning hydrogen, read up on livio dante porta he did a lot for development and application of sciance and thermal dynamics to steam locos all the way to his dieing day in 2003
For those wondering £1500 per locamotive = Roughly £40,000 (50,000$)
As sad as this is to see, it unfortunately does need to happen as we just can’t save every single steam locomotive, too much metal sitting around for hundreds of thousands of locomotives.
However, it would be nice to keep at least one of each class, that would’ve been reasonable, especially as several of the locomotives and rolling stock shown here in this video has at least one surviving example on static display or operable under steam
Some rail CEOs developed tunnel vision for progress. They hated the idea of steam and mandated that every last one of their steam locomotives was scrapped for fear of being seen as old-fashioned. That's why we don't have any New York Central Hudsons, for example.
@@TheOriginalJphyperSame here in Spain. In a country where the railroad culture is the half of the half of the half of the half of the less railroad heritage country, the new "vanguards" of progress never EVER suggested the idea of preserving iconinc pieces. Most of the most beautiful pieces we keep in some of our museums, like the Delicias Railroad Museum of Madrid, were preserved more by luck than for historical purposes.
Spain is a country where politicians love to forget, destroy, erase and let our History die.
If these engines had faces, they be screaming in agony and pain. I can picture it now...
a locomotive is worth more then scrap metal! this is just sad
BOC were rubbing their hands!!
Adjusting for inflation those £1500 scrap value locos are worth £27,766 / $35,350 in 2023 money.
That isn't THAT much money, a new car costs that much. I wonder why railfans didn't pool money together to buy one? Or why no wealthier railfans didn't buy one? A scrapped steam locomotive in 2023 is worth hundreds and thousands of dollars.
Buying a loco is fairly cheap. Moving it to it's new home is usually where the costs really increase.
A scrapped SY Class steam loco here in China goes for around $150,000 but I'm not sure if that includes the delivery fee lol.
The UK probably has the most preserved steam locos of any country in the world.
Let me keep Thomas and Edward
I know *nothing* about trains but…the silhouette of that first train on screen…same as Thomas?
This hurt to see :(
Especially on steam locomotives...this is not a scrapping, its a slaughtering.
You can't slaughter an inanimate object.
IT'S THE SCRAPPER'S TORCH!!!!!!!!
wtf today a steam locomotive worth like a gold
Not really, the shipping for one of those are not cheap! And it has to be an attractive model, in good condition and in working order...and they had thousands and thousands of them! Not just a handful...
I wonder how much they regret that decision today?
[3:04] "The Somerset Light Infantry" sounds strenge to german ears as GE locos have just numbers on them to identify.
So who named a loco after a military unit?
Фильм можно назвать "Как умирали паровозы". 😢
Were they worth more as scrap, or here in 2024 would they be worth more as full locomotives to collectors?
They where worth 15,000£ in todays money in scarp. Today you would not be able to find more than parhaps a dozen buyers, and remember they scrapped thousands of those trains! So you would struggle to sell more than a percent of them...and they would literally take up a whole trainyard...not to mention you would need giant crans to move them around if you do not own a literal train yard.
Here in the U.S. they were done by that point, The U.S. (1960) Canada (1961) And the U.K. (1963) Japan (1985)
1968 for the UK
@@florjanbrudar692 Sorry, i was off by five years my bad, And, thank you for answering my comment, And, greetings from the USA..
3 1/2 hundred weight. What's that in monkey twelfth farthings?
One CWT = 112 pounds
😮 omg the year
So sad…
We replaced visible pollution with long distance pollution, god the hypocrisy of mankind.
В СССР наверное так же было. Счас некоторые стоят на вокзалах крупных городов на запасных путях, но их мало и они не работают. Многие утилизированы и металл продан в Китай. Безумно жаль. Никто из паровозов не работает. Жаль. Я бы на небольшое расстояние лучше на ретро паровозе проехалась😊❤
No Thermal Lances in those days, you can't even use Acetylene now. Some hard graft there.
Jesus, you can't even have acetylene over there now?
I don't know so much if that's true@@cbennett1
Alec Steele would talk about his blacksmithing setup and I believe he used an acetylene oxygen setup.
@@cbennett1 I'm afraid not, not on the Railway that is. I was with the Railway Breakdown Teams for a number of years and we could only use Propane, which just isn't good enough in my opinion, but acetylene is a big no no. Propane does have some advantages, like you can store the Bottles horizontally and use them as soon as they are upright again, which you can't do with acetylene and the Bottles are much lighter but that's about the only good points I can think of, especially for Burning.
Why can’t acetylene be used?
@@bendingspring because you'll get a visit from wankers asking for a license
They had to hurry to this beautiful new world.
nice
The cry of every spotty faced, crusty sock train spotter can be heard
First it was her once mighty navy then the trains…
i guess it made sense back then, but right now it actualy hurts watching this..
It makes sense now too, we would not have a use for those old heaps of metal...and we made plenty of things out of the steel that made our society better...
if there are only a few left and you scrap those too you distroy history and the things we learned, and there are things we can learn from them again and there are still uses for them. Museums, historical train rides etc..
these machines contain the absolute basic knowlage of all our advances of today.
@@pahtriac All that knowledge is avalible at libraries, in scientific litterature etc. History is not destroyed...history is forever as long as we preserve photographs, texts and science!
books can tell you only so much..
As a hands on person i can guarentee you this.
The only kind of metal in the world that has no radioactive isotopes from atomic weapons. Would make great negative controls for the metallurgists.
Not really, there are metal from ship wrecks, new mines etc. that have low radioactivity.
I have been on the flying Scotsman
They made a dumb mistake by scrapping these locomotives
The same happens to all vehicles at the end of their useful life.
Too bad a machines useful life is seldom realized. And modern machines are built to fail.
Never fear! Steamers are still being built today!
Thats not a good thing. They are dirty and inefficient my todays standards. Only china is backward enough to still use them.
Where? On what public transport routes? On what freight routes? How many % of world train freight?
stream is better than Diesel electric.
а ведь по сути, паровоз на много долговечнее и экологичнее любого современного поезда. Залил в бак воды, напихал в топку дров и можно ехать. Американцы не знают что во время ядерной войны и постапокалипсиса, паровой будет на много ценнее дизельного поезда
Спасибо интересно.
Interesting video albeit sad to watch.
Actually they were locomotives not 'trains'.
😢
no....
it horrible each one of them had a life a job they wanted AND you let them rot
They are objects, not beings...good they where scrapped, they polluted, where dangerous and slow.
Time to take a quick bath ni foamer tears down here.
""PROGRESS OVER SENTIMENTALITY"",,,,,,,THE ATTITUDE THAT HAS A PERCENTAGE TO BLAME FOR SOCIETY BREAK DOWN AND LACK OF SELF RESPECT AND MORALS IN THIS DAY AND AGE😮
No, those responsible for that are the tech giants (Making people mentally ill, not talking about lgbtqia+ here...they are normal healthy people) leaving large parts of the internet unregulated and full of toxic hatred.
worth fortune now lol
really sad
Those locos would have been packed full of asbestos 😮
In the next 100 years the britain itself will stop exist. Time flows fast.
At least so anmy were saved at Barry.
From Barrry and no, that scrapyard's owner never intended to save them. He's been interviewed too.
Ломать не строить..........
😭
theres some rly big steam engines now days that are monster in size compared to those old locomotives
I bet Sadiq khan had something to do with this
Steam locomotives were frightfully inefficient and poisonous machines. That should help get over a lot of nostalgia.
We could just improve it's efficiency instead of throwing steam into the can and working on entirely new projects.
Even if they only reached 50% of today's efficiency, well... Our modern world is ALL about efficiency, everywhere. Yet depression rates are seeing new records. The soul of many things has been sacrificed for efficiency.
@@Ardour_of_A_Leopard People where depressed back then too, just that they most often took their lives, murdered or became othewise dangerous or self harming. We now actually diagnose people and help them...we have no real statistics from back then!
I find that disgusting and im not into trains. £1500 of scrap? Trains that were saved were sold for £60,000. Goodness knows what they're worth now.
You would not be able to find a buyer for all the thousands of train engines...the price would probably fall to nothing after you sold only a dozen...and keeping them in storage for 70 years would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. 1500£ in 1961 is 15,000£ today...
Criminal
The old sound track is so lame
The fate of all technologies. They serve us for a while until something new comes along and then sent to the scrap heap. No use getting emotional about it.
Such a sad world view
@@trevortammen2341 what? To not get emotional over the scraping of old stock? Sounds like someone watched a little too much Thomas when they were a kid…
@@trevortammen2341 "Such a sad world view"
No it isn't. It's called accepting reality and not living in the past.
Already the fact that you used a computer and the internet to post your comment proves that you fully embrace new technologies and allow obsolete technology to disappear out of your life.
You can always visit a museum if you want to look at obsolete technologies.
I just like steam locomotives guys no need to start insulting me with Thomas the tank engine inferences
@mikethespike7579 kinda hard to follow your logic because I wouldnt be able to go to a museum if someone didn't get sentimental about old technology like this
Being replaced by electric, Never ever,ever steam rules.. just my petteth
Uploading BTF contents again lol, tut tut copyrighted
Painful to watch.
Pure bliss, from steel they where made, and to steel they return to cycle a product life once again.
Those Britz sure knew how to make the most unattractive, underpowered pieces of scrap iron ever!!
He should have been wearing a mask. I wonder how old he was when he popped his clogs.
Modernise the railways! China has 30,000 kilometres of Hi-Speed rail - the UK spat the dummy after 100klm...🤣🤣😂