J.W. Logan and The Railway Children

This photograph, borrowed from The Transport Archive, shows the filming of the 1968 BBC television production of The Railway Children. Like the more celebrated Lionel Jeffries film made two years later, it starred Jenny Agutter as Bobby and was shot at Oakworth Station on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.

Of particular interest, to this blog at least, is the locomotive in the photograph. The Transport Archive explains that it is the former Logan & Hemingway contractors' locomotive Sir Berkeley.

And the Logan in Logan & Hemingway, as we recently saw, was none other than J.W. "Paddy" Logan, for many years the Liberal MP for Harborough.

Better than that, if you go to the Vintage Carriages Trust website you will find a page devoted to Sir Berkeley. And there you will learn that:

In 1935 Logan & Hemingway went into liquidation and MW 1210 was sold to the Cranford Ironstone Company of Kettering (Northamptonshire) where it received the nameplates Sir Berkeley from a scrapped Manning Wardle engine owned by the Midland Ironstone Company at Crosby (near Scunthorpe).

To the Cranford workforce however, it was always known as "Paddy Logan".

Logan died in 1922, so it is clear that his reputation lived on - locally or in the railway industry - for quite a while.