THE steam locomotive Braunton, which will celebrate its 80th anniversary next year, hauled through Wellington on Saturday morning (August 30).

The engine substituted for the Nunney Castle, which had been scheduled to pull the English Riviera Express to Kingswear, near Dartmouth, Devon, for Saphos Trains.

It was expected to travel back through Wellington at about 6.35 pm on the return journey to Bedford.

Braunton was designed by Oliver Bulleid and built in 1946, one of 110 light Pacific locomotives built for mixed-traffic duties.

It was numbered 34046 when the railways were nationalised in 1948, and was withdrawn from service and sent for scrap in 1965.

After an initial restoration attempt in Brighton in 1988 it was bought by the West Somerset Railway Association in 1996 and fully restored before steaming again in 2008.

Braunton is now part of the Saphos Trains fleet operating excursions on the mainline.

The Nunney Castle will be headlining the West Somerset Railway’s autumn steam gala from October 17 to 19.