Now here's the rub... in summer 1980 I spent 10 days with the school Scout troop at the Scout camp site at Blackwell Court, right next to the top of the Lickey Incline and on the east side of the line; partly in a cutting but also partly across a wide open field. At one point I took a photo of a train heading up the incline with a load of Mk1s behind it, but didn't have a clue which one it was.
A few minutes later someone else in the troop came running up to me and gave me the number... 44 008!
Now, this was someone who didn't have the slightest interest in trains - I was the only enthusiast in the troop. Could that person have been winding me up? It's possible, but surely highly unlikely to provide me with that particular number if that was the case?
A loaded test run after a power unit change, especially knowing the locomotive was likely to be in demand for railtours, would make sense and thinking about it, Derby to Gloucester via the Lickey would be a perfectly obvious route wouldn't it, with the triangle at Gloucester to assist with running round and the hard run back up the incline on the way back?
I do still have the photo and I tweeted it last year but I can't add it here directly right now because I still have the browser issue on my main computer - however, the tweet is searchable on Google so I can at least provide a link to it. At the time I showed the photo to another enthusiast a few years above me at school, who lived in Beeston near Nottingham and was very familiar with all Peaks, and he said it did look a bit like a 44 - but to be fair so did every single Peak... and the photo unfortunately isn't that clear; it was done on a Kodak A1 pocket camera using the very small 110 format negatives.
Can't help wondering if the picture on the badge was around that time, though...
https://twitter.com/Peter_Mugridge/status/939576793383821312