The 13th Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Revd Tony Robinson, visited Pickering in the Diocese of York today to bless and re-dedicate a newly-overhauled steam locomotive on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.
Locomotive 5428 carries the name 'Eric Treacy' on brass nameplates surmounted by a bishop's mitre; the Rt Revd Eric Treacy (1907-1978) was the 8th Bishop of Wakefield from 1968 to 1976 and was a renowned railway photographer and enthusiast over many decades.
Treacy died in 1978 on Appleby Station in Cumbria, while waiting to photograph a steam train on the Settle to Carlisle railway.
Locomotive 5428 was built in 1937 for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway to pull both passenger and goods trains.
At the end of its working life in the 1960s it was privately preserved and named after Bishop Treacy; it now pulls trains over the popular 25-mile North Yorkshire Moors Railway between Whitby and Pickering in the Diocese of York.