Fact Free Reporting

You'd think, living as we do in this age of technological marvels, where the world's accumulated knowledge is apparently at our fingertips, thanks to the internet, that the verification of media stories, rumours and the like would be straightforward.  Especially for press outlets.  But apparently not.  Just today I found myself reading a story from a Welsh online newspaper about how one of those self-styled 'urban explorers' had 'discovered' a rusting steam locomotive in some woods in East Anglia.  The story played up the 'mystery' aspect of how it came to be there, with the 'explorer' giving the usual bollocks about how, whilst locals know tat it is there, they don't know why, or how it got there.  Of course, he's not going to divulge the exact location in order to protect his 'discovery'.  A cursory online check would have provided both him and the paper with all the answers they needed.  I didn't even need to do that - a model railway forum  lurk around pointed me to all the relevant links.  The fact is that the locomotive has been 'discovered' several times - the land it rests on is part of a farm owned by a guy who runs a local steam fair.  He took the locomotive - a nineteen fifties built Finnish freight locomotive - on loan from its owner several years ago with the aim of restoring it to working order and running it on a specially built track during his annual steam fair.  Clearly, this didn't work out.  As for what a Finnish locomotive is doing in the UK in the first place, well it was one of a number of them imported here twenty odd years ago, reportedly for use as exhibits in a theme park.  When this fell through, they found themselves being moved around in search of new homes.  The problem is that Finnish railways are to five foot gauge instead of standard gauge.  Their broad gauge makes it pretty much impossible to convert them to run on standard gauge, ruling out their use on any UK preservation line.

As I say, this particular loco seems to be 'discovered' at regular intervals, each time generating a new and completely unresearched story claiming it to be a 'mystery'.  I'm only surprised that it hasn't yet featured on one of those fatuous You Tube videos about the 'Ten Most Amazing Abandoned Trains' type that you often come across.  These are entirely devoid of facts or research, cobbling together vaguely relevant video clips.  I did sit through one in which several of the 'abandoned' locomotives most obviously weren't - crew and exhaust fumes could be observed on several.  The most idiotic example they gave, though, came from the UK, highlighting a mail train 'abandoned' in sidings, complete with 'locomotive', which they identify as a 'Class 44'.  Well, for one thing, it isn't a locomotive, but an unpowered driving trailer which would have allowed the train to be reversed into terminal platforms without the loco being run around the train.  On top of that, the 'Class 44' is a long extinct 'pilot scheme' locomotive (although examples of its very similar Class 45 and Class 46 cousins still exist), which looked nothing like the driving trailer.  Finally, the most cursory search of the web would have told them that this train was one of a number made redundant when its owner lost the contract to operate Royal Mail trains.  They were placed into storage, in the hope of leasing them for some other roles, where they have remained for the past decade or so.  Sadly, this lack of basic research online is commonplace and not confined to railway-related topics.  While the You Tube video I mentioned is arguably an amateur production, where such a lack of fact checking might be forgivable, (although, personally, I think it is still unforgivable), the articles about the 'lost' locomotive have all been in supposedly 'professional' press outlets, where some degree of verification is surely mandatory.  As I said, in an age when so much information is readily accessible, without even having to get off the sofa, such a lack of standards is lamentable and is indicative of the lack of professional standards that prevail in much of what passes for journalism these days.