A dramatic image of 70044 Earl Haig, its exhaust highlighted by a misty and dark sky here on Newbold troughs in 1962 when the engine would probably have been allocated to Crewe North. Allocated from newly built in June1953 to Manchester's Longsight Motive Power Depot, and following a series of shed changes, this engine was withdrawn from Stockport Edgeley in October, 1966. During their years in service the Britannias proved useful workhorses on a wide variety of duties on all four Regions of the network, but like all new designs they had their fair share of problems, particularly in their first years, with early members of the class allocated to the Eastern Region suffering from fractures of the piston heads, caused by water being carried over into their cylinders, together with a series of instances of the main driving wheels moving on their axles, and a number of recorded instances of the drawbar between the engine and tender fracturing, not something which would have been welcomed by the footplate crews concerned !