Today, 17th June 2020, SR West Country class No. 34046 Braunton has been on a test run between Crewe and Chester.
34046 is the first steam locomotive to run on the mainline in the UK since the coronavirus lockdown began back on the 23rd March 2020.
Braunton is currently at Crewe (at the time of writing) having completed one round trip to Chester and back, it is currently set to make another round trip this afternoon.
Thanks to Kall Chels Buckley Evans, we have this photo of 34046 Braunton at Bunbury between Crewe and Chester on 0900 Crewe H.S. to Chester (if anyone has the real headcode for this, let me know in the comments below).
RailAdvent will soon have photos and videos from Richard Harnetty, which we will share with you once these are made available.
It is great to see steam return to the mainline once again and is one step closer to Saphos Trains running railtours again, with the first tour thought to be The Fellsman on Wednesday 15th July 2020.
Please Note: all images used in this article were taken following Government guidance.
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the headcode for the 09:00 crewe HS to Chester is 5D41
That’s great news, I’m booked on a Saphos trip in August and so hope that it goes ahead as planned: looking forward to seeing Royal Scot and Britannia!