Photos as steam locomotive 34052 Lord Dowding visits Chester

It seems now to be mandatory that every single “STEAM” train is obliged to have a diesel either behind the tender, or at the rear of the train. ‘Reasons’ I’ve heard for this include during the dry, hot summer, the ‘fire risk’ factor – then it being added as ‘insurance’ against breakdown or poor performance of the steam loco, or to provide banking assistance on undulating routes, the majority of these cases being unnecessary, but part of the ‘nanny’ culture we now live in, with spotty know-nothing PC jobsworths running the railways now, to computer-accurate timings, to avoid at all costs, the loss of even the odd minute on service trains. With this apparent striving for ‘atomic’ accuracy on timings, couldn’t the ‘planners’ get their own house in order – some regions’ timetables are a shambles, whilst others are virtually non-existent. As far as I can recall from my young days in the steam era (w-a-y before Beeching and all that), the railways promised nothing and the public had little in the way of expectations other than that A train would come along sooner or later (okay, maybe it was occasionally the latter), but with no complicated electric wiring and complex electronic signalling to deal with, problems tended to be local and fairly quickly remedied, not blanking out great chunks of the region as they do today. Alas a reversion to steam power is an impossible thought, but it is a fond memory, esp of how things worked so well WITHOUT the additional imposition of a smelly, carcinogenic polluting diesel on the train.