Day: 29 December 2013

Burtonwood – The Truth About G.I. Town

Steven Dowd

Four miles from Warrington in Lancashire, is Burtonwood, the great maintenance base for the American Air Lift to Berlin. There several thousand young Americans, most of whom had never been overseas before, were dumped far from their homes with orders to keep the Dakotas, Skymasters and other aircraft flying through the air door in the Iron Curtain. The success of the Air Lift was apparent to all, but locally the social consequences were less happy for both sides. Six thousand American airmen dumped down suddenly to live near a bleak…

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The Vulcan Works – Making the Lion roar again

Steven Dowd

During the early part of 1979, Ruston Diesels Limited, the Company then occupying the historic Vulcan Foundry site, agreed to restore the locomotive Lion which had been a static exhibit for many years in the Transport Gallery of Liverpool Museum. This was to provide project work for apprentices and graduate trainees, and to enable Lion to participate in the forth-coming ‘Rocket 150’ celebrations. On 4 April, the engine arrived at Ruston’s looking rather incongruous on the back of an articulated lorry and during the next few weeks it was stripped…

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