THE GREAT WESTERN SOCIETYAT 60

The Great Western Society was an organisation waiting to happen. Someone, somewhere, was bound to have the idea sooner or later. In many ways it’s surprising that it took until the 1960s before anyone did.

However, the decade was quite possibly the last chance for the old Great Western. At the end of the 1950s, British Railways, Western Region was still recognisably the GWR, using the old company’s locomotives and coaches, and running services over almost its entire network. By the end of the 1960s there were no standard gauge Great Western locomotives or coaches in service, and the network had been dramatically reduced through closures. BR’s brave new InterCity world had taken firm control.

What had been might have become just a memory but for the efforts of railway preservationists, among them four schoolboys who were of the right age and in the right place at the beginning of the 1960s to make a difference.

Jon Barlow, Angus Davis, Mike Peart and Graham Perry met regularly while trainspotting on the footbridge at Southall. The foursome, then aged just 16 or 17, were spurred into action in April 1961 by an article headed ‘British Railways Announce Preservation Plans’ that appeared in that month’s edition of Railway Modeller.

The article listed the steam locomotives scheduled for preservation – 71 in total, with just 10 from the GWR. Among the omissions on the list were Western workhorses in the shape of Halls, Manors and 14XXs.

The boys were so appalled that they formed the 48XX Preservation Society, renamed as the Great Western Preservation Society by the time of its inaugural meeting a year later. By then, its pioneers had launched an appeal and advertised the society in the railway press.

By adopting the Great Western name they took on the aura of Britain’s best-loved and longest-lived main line railway company, at a time when BR was doing its level best to destroy all things GWR.

The foursome transformed their organisation from a fund to preserve a small, albeit popular locomotive (think The Titfield Thunderbolt) into a banner around which all GWR enthusiasts could rally. They kept the Great Western brand alive