The last of the long line of locomotives to be produced at the Darlington works

“D6898 is the last of the long line of locomotives to be produced at the Darlington works.

“It was a sad moment for the 20 men still employed at the workshops where 900 had jobs 12 months ago. They watched silently with dry-eyed resentment. On Friday, most face redundancy.”

D6898 being waved away on April 28, 1964: the last diesel to be built by Stivvies before closure

But history has come full circle.

On Thursday, D6898 was formally unveiled outside the Hopetown Carriageworks on the edge of the Head of Steam museum’s site in Darlington. It had come home – and not only was it the last loco ever made in Darlington, it became the first loco ever given away by Network Rail.

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT D6898'S HOMECOMING

In 1964, when D6898 had left the Springfield Works, it had gone to Cardiff for a couple of years before returning to the North East. It was stabled from 1967 at Thornaby, which meant working the east coast from Aberdeen down to Norwich, until 2004 when railway websites list it as scrapped.

A drop of oil is added to D6898 before it leaves the Stivvies' workshop on April 28, 1964

It is a Class 37, the post-steam workhorse of the British railways, and so most watchers must have assumed it had come to the end of its natural life.

But by chance, it ended up in the possession of Network Rail – one of only five locos owned by the track authority. Still, though, it faced the end of its line: it was being slowly cannibalised by the other four locos to keep their maintenance trains running in mid-Wales.

Sir Peter Hendy is a man with several railway caps. Wearing his cap as trustee of the Science Museums Group, he was negotiating with Darlington over the fate of Locomotion No 1 when, while wearing his cap as chair of Network Rail, he discovered D6898 among his possessions. He thought it too significant to die a death of a thousand cannibal cuts, and so Network Rail returned it to the town which, 57 years earlier, had constructed it.

It has a colossal industrial beauty, and is one of the last reminders of what was once Darlington’s biggest private employer.

Robert Stephenson & Company was formed in 1823 by Robert and his father George with the finances coming from Edward Pease of Darlington and his cousin, Thomas Richardson, a London Quaker banker. This was the world’s first locomotive-making company and its first locomotive was, of course, Locomotion No 1.

An Edwardian postcard of Stivvies' Springfield Works

For the first 77 years of its life, the company was based in Newcastle but, having made about 3,000 locos, in 1899, it was looking to expand. It bought 54 acres beside the mainline at Springfield in Darlington – between Haughton-le-Skerne and Harrowgate Hill – and the first engine rolled out of its new sheds on November 4, 1902.

The opening of the Springfield Works not only marked a change of base but also a change of direction for the company. In the previous century, Stivvies had built engines for the numerous, small, private British railway companies, but in the 20th Century, they were amalgamating and becoming nationalised into huge entities which had their own locomotive-building shops (like the North Eastern Railways’ North Road in Darlington), so Stephenson's had, more than ever, to look for overseas markets.

Which, for the first three decades of its life in Darlington, it did successfully, exporting large numbers of locos to South America, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

Inside Stivvies, in Darlington, in the late 1920s. Picture courtesy of Darlington Centre for Local Studies

But then came recessions and war. In 1937, Stivvies merged with R&W Hawthorn, Leslie and Company of Newcastle, a firm of railway engineers, and then in 1944, it became part of English Electric.

Inside Stivvies in 1964 as closure was announced

Then came a complete change in the Government’s attitude to railways. Stivvies made its last steam loco in 1958 and its last diesel – D6898 – in 1962.

Springfield, where once up to 4,000 men worked, fell silent, its men either transferred to other English Electric works across the north – assistant test engine Peter Blenky told the Evening Despatch he was off to work in EE’s factory in Australia – or absorbed into new industries in Darlington, like making diesel car engines for the American firm Cummins.

The works were dismantled so that now there is no sign of them: there’s a grassy green hillock beside the mainline off Wylam Avenue, and Cairngorm Drive now runs the length of the main shed.

But at least D6898 is back – no substitute for Locomotion No 1, but standing enormously green beside the museum, it does tell an important part of Darlington’s railway story.