Sad news for class 50 fans. After spending several years slowly rusting away in a Sheffield scrapyard, No 50001 “Dreadnought” has been cut up for scrap. Only twenty-two (at the last count) of the fifty locomotives built now survive, not bad for a class of locomotive officially retired ten years ago. Most of those are in working order, and several are main-line certified.
I took this picture of 50001 hauling an empty ballast train back in 1989, just after the rundown of the class had commenced.
