Robert
An 80 year old 38 tonne 0-6-0 saddle-tank steam engine sits on a very short section of track outside Stratford station where he returned in 2011 having been on holiday to the East Anglian Railway Museum.
Robert was built in Bristol in 1933 by the Avonside Engine Company for Lamport Ironstone Mines Railway in Northamptonshire before moving to heritage railways in Buckinghamshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire then being bought by the Dockland Development Corporation in 1993 for the Kew Bridge Steam Museum.
Robert then moved to east London in 1994, to Beckton, but due to some vandalism the decision was made to send him to Stratford in 1999, where he remained until 2008. He was then moved to the East Anglia Railway Museum at Colchester for repainting, and returned to Stratford a few years later in what was officially described, for those who love Olympic jargonese, as a “softer legacy benefit” of the Olympic Games.
