Stephen Evans speaks about Canadian Pacific
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00:00Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Watercress Line on this wonderful sunny day, this auspicious
00:11day which will see the return to service of this magnificent locomotive, 35005 Canadian
00:20Pacific. The locomotive is actually owned by the Watercress Line Heritage Railway Trust
00:27which is the trust I have the honour to be chair of and so it falls to me to say thank
00:36you, in fact multiple thank yous. Firstly to the volunteers and staff at Rocklea Works
00:46on this railway and at Eastleigh who over a period of 14 years restored the locomotive
00:53to its current magnificent state. It was a fantastic job, thank you to them. Many of
00:59them of course are actually members of the trust so it's very much a collective effort.
01:07Also because often they get forgotten, a thank you to all the backroom people who work here
01:11at Oresford and in Rocklea because you can't restore a locomotive unless you've got money.
01:17If you've got money you need accounts and you need administrators, you need people to
01:21order stuff and organise stuff and so there are a huge number of people working behind
01:26the scenes who have made this magnificent engineering feat possible. But as I just hinted
01:36you do need money and we have been immensely fortunate in the generous funding that we've
01:44received from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The Lottery has been immensely patient
01:50with us because we thought we could fix this locomotive in five years, it actually took 14.
01:55But they stuck with us, they supported us, they helped us, they've encouraged us and I'm so
02:01pleased that Ailish McGuinness is here today and I will have the opportunity to hear from her
02:07shortly. And actually if I may Ailish I'd like to say a thank you to several million people because
02:15they're the people that buy the lottery tickets and it's a little bit of their money from each
02:19lottery ticket that has helped this project and helped so many worthy projects in the United
02:25Kingdom. The UK wouldn't be what it is without the National Lottery so the right moment I think to
02:30remember them, all those people who have generously bought lottery tickets over the years. And of
02:37course other donors, private individuals, institutions who have contributed funds
02:43towards the restoration of this locomotive. 35005 is the star of the show, she's an engineering
02:54masterpiece and by restoring her what of course we've done is to enable a new generation to learn
03:04about basic engineering and to then on top of those basic engineering skills learn and acquire
03:11really specialist skills. So it's all about not just preserving the past but engineering our
03:17future and that is very much at the heart of the project. But I'm also going to suggest that the
03:23project is about something else. This locomotive was built in 1941 in the darkest days of the
03:34Second World War. She was built because there was an assumption that the war would end and it would
03:41end fortuitously because it would enable this locomotive to haul normal passenger trains when
03:49hostilities that it had ended. So it really was to instill a sense of hope in the future. But she
03:58was built in wartime and for four years she actually spent her time hauling wartime related
04:04freight traffic and she carried a name and the name was Canadian Pacific, is Canadian Pacific.
04:12And it was given for a reason because the owners of the locomotives, the Southern Railway, wanted
04:19to recognize by naming the Merchant Navy class locomotives after shipping lines, all the shipping
04:28lines that were providing ships to sail across the Atlantic in the convoys braving the U-boats,
04:35to commemorate these brave sailors who sailed on these ships. And many many of course of the ships
04:42were lost including ships belonging to Canadian Pacific. So this was all about recognizing the
04:52tremendous contribution that was being made to the United Kingdom by the shipping lines in the
04:581940s and the brave sailors who sailed those ships. And of course it was noting the relationship
05:08between the United Kingdom and Canada, close allies in many wars including the Second World War.
05:16And I'm absolutely delighted that we have the Canadian Deputy High Commissioner Mr. Robert Fry
05:22with us and with his head of the communications team at the Canadian High Commission Kayla Denardi
05:32who has been involved one way or another in this project for a long time. Really great that you
05:36are with us today because we do live in pretty troubling times at the moment. But there's one
05:45thing that I think I can say without any doubt and that is that the UK-Canadian relationship
05:52is as strong as it ever has been. Canada and the UK are rock-solid in terms of their relationship
06:08and the locomotive behind me symbolizes that. Ladies and gentlemen thank you very much indeed.