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.

This pumping station was built at the site of an earlier watermill owned by the former Stratford Langthorne Abbey, from which it gained its name. The abbey stood in the marshes beside the present-​​day Channelsea River and was endowed with estates in West Ham. The first record of a mill here was in the early 14th century. The abbey remained a wealthy and influ­ential landowner until the dissolution of the monas­teries in the 1530s.

Abbey Mills pumping station is a much-​​admired masterpiece of Victorian public works engin­eering, built in 1865–8 and nicknamed ‘the cathedral of sewage’. Designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the station’s pumps drew waste water from the drains of north London and sent it down to the filter-​​beds at Beckton.

​

Coordinates: 51°31'50.99"N 0°00'05.96"W