Ah yes, those things. Now including the very Retro LED Feather signal too.
In all seriousness though I think there are some sings of changing attitudes on the line, with the first move really set in stone by the Carriage and Wagon department who purchased the Sentinel shunter from being fed up with the time taken for Sheffield Park to fire up a steam loco and then send it up to HK for any shunting to take place. Then the 73 arrived albeit for a short period, before going down to a 08. Cue the 08 not being completely up to the job required of it and along came the 33 with the intention of using it on the engineering jobs. That's led to the Locomotive department purchasing the 09 from HNRC and with the lack of run around space during the recent engineering works, along came the DMU - And surprisingly not a green one too!
Of course the other problem facing the line in the future will not just be us in the Diesel Generation and our disposable income, but also the age of us - Who wants to be up at 4 in the morning, make the journey to SP and have a long morning firing up a steam loco to get it ready for the first service of the day when... you can get up later and have a longer time to prepare the steamer for the day whilst running the first service of the day with a diesel, involving a earlier start to be achieved at the touch of a few buttons. And the Swanage manages to use DMUs into the evening.
In fact, the extension to East Grinstead has proved this point further with the first service being far popular than originally anticipated. And then there's been the recent 'shopper specials' as well.
So whilst it's disappointing that they happen to chose a Friday and not a Saturday - too many people come for the steam services at weekends apparently... even though only 1 person was disappointed and walked away when I was down there for the DMU (I was lucky enough to spend the day in the LNER car last summer during a loco groups AGM and only 2 of 50 odd people were disappointed about not having a kettle vice a day behind the 33!)... keeping an open mind is the thing to do. Gradually I think their attitudes will change completely - a mixed steam and diesel ethos works well for lines like the Swanage and West Somerset, so hopefully we'll see things change soon.
I'll certainly be there and keeping an open mind, and hopefully - whilst I appreciate the work gone into the present line they can't really claim that diesels don't quite belong there because they never ran on the line, nor did most of the steam!, They will start to include some of the history of the past 50 + Years since the end of steam. Now... about that VEP!
Oh, and who'd have thought we'd ever end up seeing this. It's becoming the BR Blue-bell railway!
