Throughout the overall overcast weeks of an English Autumn, what were the odds of one brilliantly sunny day with gentle breezes and a cloudless sky?  Geoff Silcock recounts the events of 9th November 2009 when his creation, the 1950s Time–Terrier ran again, this time with the proper BR 32678, after a break of 16 years.

When I drove along the B2082 from Tenterden to Rye the day before, the dank grey cloud and poor visibility almost sapped the spirit.  Now this is without doubt the most beautiful road through the Weald, and I described it so over two decades ago – that the apple blossom that swirled around on my journey then was not unlike the confetti from a thousand Spring weddings.  But it was now a sombre battleship-grey ghost of a road in the late afternoon of the 8th of November.

A minor miracle of autumn sunshine was needed for the next day’s activities on the K&ESR.  With the date booked several months before, many of the original 48 givers to the Birdcage Fund, to paint it into early BR red, would be there for our Time – Terrier on the morrow, plus several of our original rag tag group that helped to prepare the “Birdcage that Sang for its Supper” in those far off days of 1993, when the sun always seemed to shine on our then seemingly epic endeavours.  So the 9th of November 2009 was pay-back time with our Rooter No.32678 paired with the Mixed (train) as a representative of the Kent & East Sussex line in the early 1950s.

The sun at daybreak on the Kent coast wasn’t readily apparent and it was a little later before its brilliance broke over the wall of forbidding cloud to the east over Dungeness, to irradiate early morning progress on my pilgrimage to Tenterden.  Now this was the same B2082, nearly 16 years to the day, that I had taken for the original epic Time – Terrier undertaking; how could it be otherwise..?

The Light Railway capital of Tenterden was emerging from its slumber as I passed along the dewy and familiar close-cropped grass verges of the town.  And our down-town station was also coming to life; and there, somehow cocooned in its platform length was our Mixed again – indeed much as we’d left it there 16 years before, though give or take a millennium in between...

Our photo-charter folk were already arriving and soon the brass ting-ting of the tablet bell apparatus in the adjacent signal box announced the imminent arrival of Rooter No.32678 to our ever-increasing congregation.

After the last of our guests had embarked, we set sail for Bodiam, with some of us viewing the passing scene from the uppermost reaches of the guard’s van end of the Birdcage coach, complete with the ship’s wheel at the helm – in reality the brake wheel – and overlooking the diminutive Rooter strutting its stuff ahead of us, with its chaff ever spiralling over our shoulder.