Sheets are loose on the wagon - would a bobby stop the train for that? The wild Lupins are flowering & all is well in the last summer of steam banking. Colin Ryder adds the details 75026 of Carnforth (10A) MPD has just passed under the Kendal to Appleby A685 road and is passing ‘Rock Cottage(s)’, which is now a modernised single house, but was originally built as two cottages by the LNWR for a ganger and a platelayer and their families [1]. Immediately to the north of the cottage(s) is the site of the former Hay Fell SB, about where the flat-roofed brick hut is situated [2]. It derived its name from its location on the side of Hay Fell behind where the photographer would be standing on the overline road bridge. It was one of the small LNWR ‘A’ type boxes of four levers like the one at Scout Green, but on a taller brick base [3]. It was demolished in May 1949 and replaced by up and down Intermediate Block Signals [4]. The line can be seen starting to make “a very severe eastward curvature … from a generally south-to-north alignment to one generally west-to-east for the next few miles” [1] which will take it over Docker Viaduct and past Grayrigg to Low Gill where it resumes its northerly direction through the Lune Gorge to Tebay. [1] : Over Shap to Carlisle, Harold Bowtell, Ian Allan, 1983, p.31 [2] : op.cit. p.72 [3] : op.cit. p.73 [4] : op.cit. p.28 Peter Kerslake adds A fine study of 75026 working hard aas she assists a freight to Shap summit , a duty which she had been introduced to earlier that year , and which she would undertake until the need for such banking assistance diminished in the last months of 1967 . Allocated from new in 1954 a very long way from here to Plymouth's Laira Depot together with sister engine 75025 the two Standard Class Fours were initially rostered on pilot duties to express passenger workings over the South Devon banks between Plymouth and Newton Abbot. It 's interesting to recall that 75026 started life from newly built at Swindon in early 1954 and in company with sister engines 75025 and 75028 allocated to Plymouth's Laira Depot , a long way from here , where they were evaluated in their early days there for their suitability as pilot engines to passenger workings between Plymouth and Newton Abbot over the notorious South Devon banks , supplementing the Manors in particular on such duties. As the need for such piloting duties diminishped when the Diesels arrived in the late ' fifties a number of the class were sent to mid Wales to work passenger turns mainly between Machynlleth and Shrewsbury on the former Cambrian section being displaced from there by Diesel Multiple Units in mid January of 1965 , and I assume it was from then that a number went to Tebay for banking duties as shown here. .