The Strathspey Railway - Aviemore Page 1			Visit the Page of Still Photographs Taken by Timon Rose
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As soon as I returned from my August 2006 trip to England, I learnt the Great Western Railway engine 4-4-0 No 3404 'City of Truro' was a guest engine on the Strathspey Railway at Aviemore.  My initail reaction was "Oh! Bother. I've seen enough of trains over the past week to keep both me and my website happy for months"  However, come the middle of September and birthday commiserations had passed, (the word commiseration is more appropriate than celebration at my age) then the steam engine bug began to bite again.  So on September 15th 2006 I set off to film the 'City' on its last day of service at Aviemore before it returned south.  Click the above link to visit the Strathspey Railway web site and the City of Truro link for an excellent site called the Great Western Archive.
Sunday September 15th started off as great sunny day.  Very bad for filming engines with the sun behind them!  However, that wasn't the only little local difficulty.  The City of Truro was having a bit of a problem with slipping.  What I didn't notice as I was filming, was the man in the blue overalls and engine drivers cap doing a spot of hand sanding.  Pictures taken later in the day clearly demonstrate that the City of Truro only had a sanding device for forward travel.  Well lets face it, in the first half of the 20th century the station pilots would carry out the menial tasks of shunting the coaches into position.
I'm not quite sure what happened next because after leaving the train coaches at the Boat of Garten station platform the engine then detached from the train and dissappeared behind the Royal Scotsman.  The above left video clip show the engine emerging from behind the Royal Scotsman only this time without the slipping and the hand sanding that went on before.  The above right shows the engine coming back to rejoin the train.
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