The Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway sits at the heart of a World Heritage Site on the edge of the Brecon Beacons.
The area is a poignant and lasting monument to its industrial past.
Flanked by the historic Blaenavon Ironworks on one side and the Big Pit National Coal Museum on the other, the railway is a beautifully preserved reminder of heritage and history in the age of steam.
It's fitting then that the railway's newest addition has a story every bit as compelling as the echoes of the past that resonate through the area.
A 0-6-0 saddle tank steam engine, built by the Hunslet Engine Company in Leeds in 1937, the locomotive started her working life at East Moors Steelworks in Cardiff, a huge site on the outskirts of the city which dominated the local skyline.
Jessie, was engine number 18, of a fleet of 18 engines that served the needs of the steelworks.
She spent all her working life at East Moors, hauling ladle wagons of slag to the seashore tip or pushing 10-150-tonne torpedo wagons of molten iron ore between the blast furnaces and the melting shop.
At that time East Moors was huge, employing 5,000 people, and had a network of tracks on which the engines worked. Part of Jessie’s job was taking the molten slag down to the foreshore and it was a spectacular sight, seeing the sky light up as it was tipped into the sea.
The engines that would do these jobs were given the nickname Jessies – the reason the engine acquired its name.
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It's around 28 miles from Blaenavon to the former East Moors Steelworks, which still has a presence in the city, albeit on a much pared down scale.
The story of Jessie has become nigh-on legendary in heritage railway circles thanks to the efforts of Mike Pearce, who has devoted his life to a little engine he considers part of his family.
He first encountered Jessie as an apprentice at East Moors in the late 1950s and decades later rescued the locomotive from a park in Cardiff.
“My first job was at East Moors in July 1958,” says Mike, who lives in Aberthin in the Vale of Glamorgan. “For the first six months I was at trade school working as an apprentice fitter and turner. Part of the apprenticeship was to work in the various departments at the steelworks. I worked in the loco shop on Jessie and the 17 other steam engines they had there.
“When I finished my apprenticeship, I was asked what department I wanted to work in and immediately I said the loco shop, but sadly there were no vacancies. My next choice was working with plant machinery as a fitter.
“I left in 1966 and was employed by Ryan Plant working in the colliery tips around south Wales, which I did for 20 years.”
After he left East Moors, Mike – now 78 – retained his love of steam engines, inherited from his dad and uncle who both worked for Great Western Railways. However, it wasn’t until 1979 when a colleague alerted him to an advert in the South Wales Echo that he and Jessie would become reacquainted.
“When I got home in the evening, I found the previous night’s Echo and it said ‘Steam Engine for sale, apply Cardiff City Council’ and I suddenly realised then it was Jessie,” says Mike.
“By the mid-1960s East Moors had gradually been transferring over to diesel and Jessie, number 18, was the last steam engine of its kind left. Instead of scrapping it, they cosmetically restored it and presented it to the city of Cardiff in 1965 – as a memorial to steam.
“I remembered it wasn’t long before I left East Moors that they installed it in Splott Park (the park nearest to the steelworks in the city) as they wanted to do something for the local children, so put it in the playground for the kids to play on. It had railings all around it and stairs leading up to the cab.
“I knew it had been installed but then had forgotten about it. When I saw the advert I shot straight down the park to take a look at it. It was in a terrible state, had lost the whistle and dome cover and was covered in graffiti, but I was surprised the motion, the pistons and everything was still in it.”
Although the locomotive had now become too unsafe to stay in the park, Mike resolved to save it from being scrapped.
“When they put the tenders out, I was the only one who wanted to preserve it, all the other tenders went in from scrap merchants,” he recalls. “When the steelworks found out the council was selling it, they said they didn’t mind who bought it as long as it was preserved and on no account was it to be scrapped.
“That narrowed it down. I handed my tender in and two months later I got home and my wife Annie said, ‘Congratulations, you own a steam engine!’
Mike finally purchased Jessie in 1980 for £2,255 – quite a lot of money in those days.
“I worked out a figure just above the current scrap value back then,” he says. “There was copper, bronze and white metal on it, so it was worth quite a bit.”
At the time, Mike was a volunteer at the Dean Forest Railway and planned to move Jessie to the rail preservation group’s base in Lydney.
The father-of-two discovered that buying the locomotive was the easy part. Moving it from the park was harder – after he had given it a thorough clean, thanks to the less appealing habits of some of those children who had played on it in the intervening years.
“The kids used to use the cab as a toilet – the first job I did when I prepped it ready for moving was to take a gallon of disinfectant and threw it everywhere,” he says.
"When we were trying to move it, we were besieged with kids who wanted to play on it for one last time – it was as if they didn’t want it to be moved.
“The money I paid for the engine paid for children’s play equipment in the park to replace Jessie.”
Taking Jessie to the Forest of Dean, where the engine was taken apart ready for a hugely-ambitious restoration job, was the beginning of a 23-year project that would dominate his life and put a strain on his marriage.
“Jessie spent 15 years in the forest, where I was a volunteer mechanical engineer,” says Mike. “At the beginning I was working at Ryans during the day, where they were still using steam engines, so I would alert site foremen of what I was doing and would acquire parts that way.
“But initially it was a source of friction between my wife and I for many years, given the amount of time I spent away from home working on it at the Dean Forest Railway. There were times when I was stood in the middle of a pile of junk, I would think to myself, ‘I’m never going to finish this’. I was involved in restoring so many engines and Jessie used to take a back seat. It seemed to go on forever and my wife was getting fed-up.”
The project was a painstakingly slow affair for Mike given his work commitments and his volunteering, snatching time with Jessie when he could.
However, by 1995 the project was back on track when he and his wife moved to Llangollen, where Mike was offered a job as the mechanical foreman in charge of restoration and repairs on the Llangollen Railway, one of the UK’s premier heritage steam railways.
It was a stunning location, iving in a bungalow which backed on to the picturesque line a couple of hundred yards away from Llangollen Station.
The move to the heart of locomotive restoration focused his mind and one night a week he and a colleague, Mark Leeman-Lawrie, would work on Jessie.
“It took so long because Jessie is a unique engine, an important design in the age of industrial steam engines,” explains Mike. “It’s the last of its kind – there were only 18 when they were built and this is the only one left. Parts have come from all over the world – from South Africa, Mozambique and Poland.
“There are a few items from the engine when it was in the park in Cardiff, like the regulator handle, that are original but most of the rest of the components in the cab have been acquired or made over the years.”
December 29, 2003 is a date that will forever be inscribed on Mike’s memory. It was the day his dreams were finally realised – the day Jessie moved under her own steam for the first time in 23 years.
For a railway enthusiast with a lifelong emotional attachment to a locomotive rescued from the scrapheap, it was understandably an emotional occasion.
“When you spend half your life doing something that is your passion it’s pretty exhilarating and it was such a wonderful moment, especially when Jessie pulled the passenger coaches at Llangollen for the first time,” he recalls.
Jessie was originally painted black with bumblebee stripes at East Moors, then green when she was installed in Splott Park. As part of the restoration, the locomotive was painted maroon, a colour originally used by Great Western Railways and chosen to match the coaches at Llangollen Railway
You might think that was the closing chapter in the story of the little engine that has led an incredible life. Mike’s 23-year restoration project may have brought Jessie back to life, but this magical tale had another plot twist.
For a locomotive that generations of children loved playing on in a park in Cardiff, the next chapter of Jessie’s story was as unexpected as it was fitting.
Unrecognisable from the maroon engine restored with such love by Mike Pearce, she spent last year thrilling new generations of children with a smiley face and unmistakable blue paintwork as the most famous and most loved steam engine on the planet – Thomas the Tank Engine.
How Jessie became one of the most identifiable of children’s icons involves luck and timing.
“There was another engine that was Thomas for quite a few years that ran out of Llangollen,” says Mike. “It came back here for maintenance in the middle of the season in 2008. It came in for a boiler wash-out and a check-up and it was found to have a leak in the boiler.
“We had a nine-day Thomas event coming to Llangollen and we were in trouble.
“I said to my boss, ‘We could probably convert Jessie to Thomas’, so I designed a set of tanks for it. I measured it up and had it cut to shape and welded it on. We had two weeks to do it.”
“The top of the dome was actually a Chinese wok,” he laughs. “Because you can’t buy anything new in steam preservation, so you have to improvise.
“The two weeks went by in a mad rush and we got it done, just. The night before the event we were finishing painting it.
“It carried on for the rest of that season and all of the next season. Jessie did 18 months as Thomas.
“In the meantime we repaired the boiler on the other engine and then converted my Thomas back to Jessie.
“The other engine carried on as Thomas for another couple of years, then the owner sold it. He gave me the nod that he was going to do this. I had to get permission from the (Thomas The Tank Engine’s) American owners HIT Entertainment, who had to approve everything. And that was it, Jessie had been Thomas since 2011.”
Where once Jessie entertained children in a park in Cardiff, Thomas delighted thousands of children at heritage railways around the UK and in Europe.
Having moved back to south Wales from Llangollen three years ago, 2018 was the final year that Mike’s engine would run as Thomas.
With one eye on a partial retirement, it was time for a poignant return home for the engine.
“Thomas has been a wonderful product, that’s been so popular, but it was time to bring Jessie back home,” says Mike.
It was always likely that this characterful locomotive would reside at a local heritage railway site, and after meeting with Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway director Alex Hinshelwood and his team, a deal was struck.
"I wanted to keep it as near as I could to my home so I could go and visit and repair it and drive it and work on it,” says Jessie’s owner. “I didn’t want to send it halfway across the county as it did as Thomas.”
After more than 50 years, Jessie’s return home has also seen a return to the engine’s original East Moors steelworks livery - black with bumblebee stripes.
“Alex and the boys at the railway suggested painting it,” explains Mike. “I’d never thought about it, but it seemed a nice idea to put it back in its authentic livery.
“Railway users like to see engines painted in their original colours. I’m overjoyed with it. They’ve done an amazing job.”
Whether this is the final chapter in the story of the little steam engine that has led such an amazing life remains to be seen. However, Mike talks in revered tones about his emotional journey and his debt of gratitude to the 82-year-old steam engine that changed his life forever.
“I’ve been the most fortunate person for the 78 years I’ve been on this planet, the experiences I’ve had,” he says. “It’s not been a job. I just think to myself, 'How lucky am I to get paid for doing what I’m doing' – and I’m still doing it.
“I look at Jessie as part of my family. I’ve owned it for 39 years. It’s my youngest child. I’ve owned it longer than the steelworks had it.
“But I’m just a custodian of this engine while I’m on this planet. I’ve done my bit.
“I’ve rebuilt it from a heap of scrap to a working engine and it’s given me so many years of pleasure and I’ve seen thousands of people have pleasure out of it as well.
“I hope the next owner carries on and keeps it running for future generations.”
Jessie will make her first appearance at Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway across the Easter weekend. To find out more visit the railway website at: http://pontypool-and-blaenavon.co.uk
