Return trip to the age of steam

Once underway, Elizabeth is revealed as an expressive piece of machinery. You half expect this venerable steam engine to start complaining about the weather like a character in a Thomas the Tank Engine story.

Departing her garage on the main west-bound road out of town, her daily grind begins comfortably enough with a long straight galloping gradient nearly all the way down to the sea. The wind whips the smoke from her chimney but the sun comes out and here there's plenty of room on the carriageway for manoeuvre.

It's a rattley ride, even though she has pneumatic tyres. As the streets start to narrow approaching the harbour, it's a relief to see drivers coming in the opposite direction giving way. This is nearly 11 tons of steam engine bearing down on them carrying 600 gallons of water, a third of a tonne of coal and with a roaring furnace at the front. Imagine hitting that in your tinny hatchback.

By the harbour, driver Vernon Smith hauls on the wheel to turn left into Haggersgate, a thoroughfare built to a pre-motor vehicle scale. Twisting through it looks hard work – no power steering for Vernon. Beside him in the cab is his fireman, Vernon junior, squashed up against the coal stack. At the back and wearing the same blue overalls is conductor, wife and mum Vivien. Completing the family team is Buster the dog on his permanent spot on the wooden front seat with a bit of bedding laid over to soften it.

This travelling family affair is unique. There's nothing quite like Elizabeth anywhere else. She rumbles up to the lifeboat station and stops with a hiss. We have arrived at the terminus at the bottom of the cliff road known as the Khyber Pass. The Smiths are greeted

cheerily. "Morning Geraldine." "Morning Viv."

Elizabeth waits, panting softly.

The first passengers up the steps are mostly wearing the immaculate anoraks, shower-proof windcheaters and trainers of the retired. Within a couple of minutes of setting off, they are looking out from the clifftop at whitecaps chasing each other to the beach under a brilliant sun.

To get up here, Elizabeth has climbed through the hairpin bends and the one-in-six gradient of the Khyber Pass at a speed which defied her years. This payload is nothing for her 80 horse power. She could pull 20 tonnes up here if asked.

A young women holds a little child up to a window to look and wave as we scoot past the entrances of The Haven, Seaview, Morningside, the La Rosa Hotel and the rest and finally reach level going and Captain Cook sternly gazing out to sea.

The appeal to many of these passengers might be nostalgia.

They look as if they might just about remember the last embers of the age of steam. But as the morning wears on, it's clear Elizabeth's appeal is universal.

It's true she doesn't speak, but she certainly communicates.

Her benign presence ambling round the streets lights up faces on the pavement and prompts smiles and waves from young and old. If goodwill was money, her owners would soon be millionaires.

On first meeting it's clear within seconds that all the Smiths live and breathe their work.

They have the look of people who were born in overalls, an impression which turns out to be wrong. Vernon was a bank manager and when he met Vivien she was a bi-lingual secretary.

By that date Vernon was fulfilling his passion for steam and working as a full-time volunteer on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and she was working in their offices in Pickering. At that time she paid little heed to to the locos that steamed up and down the line outside her window. "It was job, not a passion or even an interest," says Vivien. "With Vernon it was a case of 'love me, love my steam engine'.

"I have learned about engineering because of the job and I'm no stranger now to wielding a spanner or getting my hands dirty. The more you learn, the more you become interested."

It was when Vernon was looking round for a business opportunity that he came across Charlotte, a four litre, 17 horsepower bus manufactured in 1929 by Dennis. This had run on service in Llandudno till 1954, retired in 1972 and then languished under a tarpaulin in a barn in Loftus.

In 2003 a restored Charlotte became the first vintage vehicle of a new business, the Northern Star Steam and Motor Carriage Company, set up by the Smith family. The "steam" in the title was was only added later.

In the beginning, petrol-driven Charlotte was going to be the star of the show. But within three years she was eclipsed by Elizabeth, the world's only three-axle steam bus.

She began life as a lorry, manufactured by a company called Sentinel in Shrewsbury. Sentinel preferred the term "waggon", a spelling which sounds like a conscious attempt to embrace the past. And from our viewpoint, putting steam vehicles on the road does sound an antiquated notion. But in the first decade of the 20th century when Sentinel started out, it made a lot of sense. One of their waggons could haul several times the payloads of standard three to eight ton petrol lorries.

They kept going for longer than you might think. Sentinel made a one-off batch for Argentina as late as in the mid-1950s. By then, some of the engineering was quite advanced, using aluminium for the engine casing and steering box.

A big selling point was their simplicity. Anyone could understand this technology, a fact Sentinel boasted about in one of its 1930s brochures which announced, "even coolies can manage them".

Vernon reckons steam's demise was not because the technology was out-of-date. He talks darkly of a stitch-up by the petrol lobby who pushed through demands that steam vehicles must be be dual-manned and then followed that up by insisting their payloads and speeds be cut.

Surely today's motorists are the winners? Imagine being stuck today in a queue on the M62 behind a line of these lumbering giants. Their big economic drawback is lack of flexibility. Once the boiler has been lit, it has to be stoked all the time. There's no switching off to save fuel when the vehicle is at rest.

Elizabeth hauled cement until 1948 and ended her working days as a tar sprayer. Pensioned off to a scrapyard, she was rescued and preserved in 1962. Vernon bought her in her original form as a flat-bed waggon. He saw the future when he took her to steam rallies and occasionally gave children rides by sticking garden benches on the back of the waggon. The seats were not bolted on, there was no roof. But there was the germ of an idea. Was it feasible to convert a waggon into a bus? Vernon had two teacher friends, experts in metalwork and woodwork, who reckoned they could do it. But a local MoT examiner said the likelihood of Elizabeth passing the test was zero. For one thing, the driver's view is obstructed and for another, the exhaust is at the wrong end. Elizabeth could not be run for hire or reward without an MoT and there seemed no way round it.

Vernon approached an official at the Department of Transport who thought it was a wonderful idea. But he retired and his successor was less keen. "No" does not seem to be a word in Vernon's lexicon and he pressed on, accumulating a data bank in his head of rules and regulations which he taps into now with practised ease.

"We might have had an expensive white elephant on our hands," he says. "Eventually a vehicle special order was written for our case signed by the Secretary of State for Transport."

It meant Vernon could give the green light to his teacher friends to construct an ash framework. They then employed traditional coach-building skills to bring a bus into being from April to November 2005. The bus body can be craned on and off without affecting the integrity of the of the waggon frame.

So Elizabeth became a one-off, a seaside advert for a very British brand of ingenuity, idiosyncrasy and stubbornness. Her presence on the road is a challenge to "them" – the faceless deniers of fun and anonymous framers of regulations. On the trip, her pensioner passengers are already half aware of that and Vivien lards it on with her brisk conductress banter. There's applause and laughter when she mentions that bureaucrats insisted the vehicle's weight had to be painted on in kilograms. "But they were told there's nothing metric about this vehicle. So we were allowed to put it in Imperial." That's the appeal in a nutshell: Empire, British is best, the little people's scheme trumping caution and conformity.

When our circular tour arrives back at the bottom of the Khyber Pass, Vernon sits in his cab and gravely signs autographs. Vivien concedes it took some persuading to get him to agree to this. But the fact is, as she points out to her passengers, in engine-driving terms, he is as big a star as they come. Vernon drove the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films and also made appearances on the footplate in the North Yorkshire-based television series The Royal and Heartbeat.

He grew up in Leeds but his grandmother is from Whitby and he reckons he started watching trains there at three and was shovelling coal at eight. The skills acquired are being passed to Vernon junior.

"There's no driving test in steam or qualifications," says Vivien. "You learn as you do – just as they always did, the men taught the boys. I used to be the fireman until we took on Vernon junior. You have to have a conductor. Now I'm the oldest clippie in town. I'm the only clippie in town." They plan to take on a driver for Charlotte when the season gets going.

For steam enthusiasts Elizabeth is a symphony of chains, sprockets and bearings. Ordinary holidaymakers seem equally smitten. A woman once approached Vernon's cab and sniffed appreciatively at the sulphurous, steamy atmosphere inside. "If you could bottle that, I'd wear it," she said. "I don't think we dared to hope, it was very much a leap into the unknown with Elizabeth," adds Vivien. "We're thrilled by how much they have taken us into their hearts. Even boy racers wave us out at junctions."

The daily round on a steam bus means heavy work – manhandling bags of coal, stored beside the lifeboat station, and top-ups with water every five trips. To keep it on the road the maintenance is prodigious. A new boiler this winter cost 25,000 and 1,100-worth of coal is used every 12 to 14 days. A new tyre costs 700. This is a world where tradition really means something. When the Smiths needed a replacement main bearing, they found one by tracking down one of the suppliers listed in a 1931 Sentinel manual. "If she's not out working, we're not earning," says Vivien. "We sometimes work till midnight to get her out the next day. A friend who helps with the maintenance was a chief officer on ships and there's a boat builder who bends over backwards to help if we need something. A lot of local businesses give their support."

At least they have a clear run where rules and regulations are concerned. Their special dispensation runs to 2013. "We had to give an assurance it would be in a roadworthy condition and it's inspected every six weeks, just like any other bus," says Vernon. "The boiler is inspected every year." Insurance? "Nobody would touch us." However an underwriter at Lloyds of London has written them a policy – 6,000 for both buses including a hefty excess.

Insurers don't figure much in Thomas the Tank Engine and it's difficult to imagine what they might think of real adventures and scrapes. One summer night the Smiths were driving Elizabeth to a steam rally in Leeds when they were stopped by a police car. "They said they had had three calls from motorists about a lorry on fire," says Vernon. "Two firecrews were looking out for us."

Departing Whitby by conventional means, I ask a taxi driver if he's heard any complaints about coal-burning Elizabeth polluting the Whitby air. He pondered a minute and said, "If you're on a hill, getting behind the open-topped tour buses with their old diesel engines is

far worse."

Maybe we got it all wrong. Steam lorries might have made better heavy-duty companions in an M62 traffic jam after all.

YP MAG 24/4/10