Railway Mission News • Issue 21.3

Page 22

No.27 comes home John Lunn, retired driver with the London Overground, tells us a fascinating story of how he was reunited with a childhood miniature rail project, in a journey that began 6,600 miles from where he lives today. As a child, John and his family travelled on a long trip by train, ship and ferry from London, England to a city called Victoria in British Columbia, Canada for a new life. As a schoolboy in Canada, John was introduced to Dave Brown who was the driver and locomotive engineer for a miniature railway, where he met Sam Sunter, who owned miniature

train No.27, then known as ‘Isabel,’ and, subsequently, under Sam’s guidance, John found himself driving the train, something he enjoyed immensely. John says, “I cleaned and scoured her until she was fit to work a royal train. Sam must have been impressed with my care for his loco because he stamped my name on the boiler backhead.” John was mystified by this at the time, but the story doesn’t end there, because years later when John had returned to England and had embarked on a long career in the railways, he was contacted by new owners of No.27 because they saw

22


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.