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When I was little boy growing up in the 1970s, I wanted to be one of two things – a footballer or a train driver.

Admittedly, both vocations were standard fare for any wide-eyed five-year-old who had already crossed astronaut and fireman off his career development list.

I had plenty of practice on the footballing front, growing up on a council estate in Cardiff with lots of children my own age to play with – and impromptu 20-a-side matches not an uncommon occurrence.

But you'd think testing out my train-driving skills would be a little tricky for a nipper.

And there you would be very wrong indeed. Not only was I able to soak up some nifty knowledge courtesy of US television show Casey Jones – featuring the adventures of the eponymous railroad engineer and the crew of the Cannonball Express steam locomotive, which was regularly aired on the BBC in the mid-1970s – but I also had my own personal locomotive to play with.

No, it wasn't imaginary. It actually existed. In a park. In Cardiff. Splott Park, to be exact. And Jessie was my first love.

(Image: John Wiltshire)

How this magnificent locomotive had come to find a home in the park and what its life story was I had no idea. All I knew was that she was beautiful and special, despite the unsightly rashes of rust, the ugly graffiti and the strange smell that came from the engine’s cab.

My nan lived a stone’s throw away from the park, so I would while away those endless summer holidays that you experience when you are a child playing on this well-worn piece of local history. I couldn’t have been happier or more content.

Whether Jessie was in fact male or female I hadn’t ascertained, but in my mind she was a grand old lady – a comforting presence but frayed at the edges.

My chief game was pretending I was Casey Jones thundering down the tracks with the TV series’s famous theme tune carousing about my brain – “Casey Jones... steaming and a-rolling... Casey Jones... you never have to guess... when you hear the tooting of the whistle, it’s Casey at the throttle of the Cannonball Express”.

As I grew up and the advancement of teenage years meant my allegiances switched to more grown-up pursuits – chiefly trying to buy cider and get into nightclubs when I was 15 – I gradually forgot about this rusting relic of a bygone era. That was until I was interviewed by local website We Are Cardiff about growing up in the city.

Then the memories of those glorious summers came rushing back and I animatedly relived the story of this little engine that made me smile at the very mention of its name. Little did I know then of the grand adventure that would lie ahead – or of the incredible, scarcely believable story that I would uncover.

A few weeks after the We Are Cardiff interview was published I was contacted on Facebook by a guy called Craig Macdonald, who sent me a message and attached a picture that made my heart leap and, I’m not ashamed to say, made tears well up in my eyes. It was like a lightning rod to my past, 40-odd years later.

His message read: “Just a quick hello, was reading the interview in which you mentioned ‘I would spend endless summers watching the holidays drift by in the park playing on Jessie the steam locomotive that was positioned in the park’. Jessie was actually purchased by my father-in-law who set about restoring the engine to full working order and still owns it.”

The picture that Craig had attached showed Jessie, now painted maroon and restored to her former glory, looking as good as new.

One phone call later and I was speaking to Craig’s father-in-law, Mike Pearce, a wonderful man who I quickly came to discover had devoted his life to this little engine, which he considered part of his family.

I learned how Mike had first encountered Jessie when he was an apprentice at East Moors Steelworks in Cardiff in the late 1950s and how he had rescued the locomotive from Splott Park decades later.

(Image: Western Mail & Echo)

“My first job was at East Moors in July 1958,” says Mike, who now lives in Aberthin in the Vale of Glamorgan. “For the first six months I was at trade school working as an apprentice fitter and turner. Part of the apprenticeship was to work in the various departments at the steelworks. I worked in the loco shop on Jessie and the 17 other steam engines they had there.

“Jessie is a 0-6-0 saddle tank steam engine, built by the Hunslet Engine Company in Leeds in 1937 and was engine number 18.

“She spent all her working life at East Moors, hauling ladle wagons of slag to the seashore tip or pushing 10-150-tonne torpedo wagons of molten iron ore between the blast furnaces and the melting shop.

“At that time East Moors was huge, employing 5,000 people, and had a network of tracks on which the engines worked. Part of Jessie’s job was taking the molten slag down to the foreshore and it was a spectacular sight seeing the sky light up as it was tipped into the sea.

“The engines that would do these jobs were given the nickname Jessies – and that’s how the engine got its name.

“When I finished my apprenticeship, I was asked what department I wanted to work in and immediately I said the loco shop, but sadly there were no vacancies. My next choice was working with plant machinery as a fitter.

“I left in 1966 and was employed by Ryan Plant working in the colliery tips around south Wales, which I did for 20 years.”

After he left East Moors, Mike – who is now 77 – still retained his love of steam engines, which he had inherited from his dad and uncle who both worked for Great Western Railways. However, it wasn’t until 1979 when a work colleague at Ryan Plant alerted him to an advert he had spotted in our sister newspaper, the South Wales Echo, that he and Jessie would quickly become reacquainted.

“When I got home in the evening, I found the previous night’s Echo and it said ‘Steam Engine for sale, apply Cardiff City Council’ and I suddenly realised then it was Jessie,” says Mike.

“By the mid-1960s East Moors had gradually been transferring over to diesel and Jessie, number 18, was the last steam engine of its kind left. Instead of scrapping it, they cosmetically restored it and presented it to the city of Cardiff in 1965 – as a memorial to steam.

“I remembered it wasn’t long before I left East Moors that they installed it in Splott Park as they wanted to do something for the local children, so put it in the playground for the kids to play on. It had railings all around it and stairs leading up to the cab.

“I knew it had been installed but then had forgotten about it. When I saw the advert I shot straight down the park to take a look at it. It was in a terrible state, had lost the whistle and dome cover and was covered in graffiti, but I was surprised the motion, the pistons and everything was still in it.”

Although the locomotive had now become too unsafe to stay in the park, Mike quickly resolved to save the steam engine from being scrapped.

“When they put the tenders out, I was the only one who wanted to preserve it, all the other tenders went in from scrap merchants,” he recalls. “When the steelworks found out the council was selling it, they said they didn’t mind who bought it as long as it was preserved and on no account was it to be scrapped.

“That narrowed it down. I handed my tender in and two months later I got home and my wife Annie said, ‘Congratulations, you own a steam engine!’”

Mike finally purchased Jessie in 1980 for £2,255 – quite a lot of money in those days.

“I worked out a figure just above the current scrap value back then,” he says. “There was copper, bronze and white metal on it, so it was worth quite a bit.”

At the time, Mike was a volunteer at the Dean Forest Railway, around an hour’s drive away from Cardiff in the West Country and was going to move Jessie to the rail preservation group’s base in Lydney.

The father-of-two quickly discovered that buying the locomotive was the easy part. Then came the little matter of attempting to move it from the park – after he had given it a thorough clean, thanks to the less appealing habits of some of those children who had played on it in the intervening years.

“The kids used to use the cab as a toilet – the first job I did when I prepped it ready for moving was to take a gallon of disinfectant and threw it everywhere,” he says, making me a little sad (and a little sick at the thought of what I was actually standing in back in the day).

“I remember we had a handing-over ceremony in the park, with a buffet reception. The council officials asked me how I intended to move the engine.

“I told them that they would have to remove the ornamental gates to the park, so I could get a low loader truck in. They were horrified and told me I couldn’t do that as the lowloader would sink as the play area was thin Tarmac, so I had to lay rail tracks in front of the engine and with my Land Rover we managed to move it on to the tracks and work it all the way down the park until we got it somewhere near the gate.

“Then the council came with a lorry and tractor and lifted these ornamental gates off. I thought, ‘I hope I’m not going to get a bill for this lot’. The whole park looked like the Battle of the Somme. There were broken sleepers and mud everywhere. When we were trying to move it, we were also besieged with kids who wanted to play on it for one last time – it was as if they didn’t want it to be moved.

“Thankfully, the council didn’t bill me for a penny. I was very lucky and the money I paid for the engine paid for children’s play equipment in the park to replace Jessie.”

Taking Jessie to the Forest of Dean, where the engine was taken apart ready for a hugely-ambitious restoration job, was the beginning of a 23-year project that would not only dominate his life but put a strain on his marriage.

“Jessie spent 15 years in the forest, where I was a volunteer mechanical engineer,” says Mike. “At the beginning I was working at Ryans during the day, where they were still using steam engines, so I would alert site foremen of what I was doing and would acquire parts that way.

“But initially it was a source of friction between my wife and I for many years, given the amount of time I spent away from home working on it at the Dean Forest Railway. There were times when I was stood in the middle of a pile of junk, I would think to myself, ‘I’m never going to finish this’. I was involved in restoring so many engines and Jessie used to take a back seat. It seemed to go on forever and my wife was getting fed-up.”

The project was a painstakingly slow affair for Mike given his work commitments and his volunteering, snatching time with Jessie when he could.

However, by1995 the project was back on track when he and his wife moved to Llangollen, where Mike was offered a job as the mechanical foreman in charge of restoration and repairs on the Llangollen Railway, one of the UK’s premier steam railways.

It was a move to a stunning location, he and his wife living in a bungalow which backed on to the picturesque line a couple of hundred yards away from Llangollen Station.

The move to the heart of locomotive restoration focused his mind and one night a week he and a colleague, Mark Leeman-Lawrie, would work on Jessie.

“It took so long because Jessie is a unique engine, an important design in the age of industrial steam engines,” explains Mike. “It’s the last of its kind – there were only 18 when they were built and this is the only one left. Parts have come from all over the world – from South Africa, Mozambique and Poland.

“There are a few items from the engine when it was in the park in Cardiff, like the regulator handle, that are original but most of the rest of the components in the cab have been acquired or made over the years.”

December 29, 2003 is a date that will forever be inscribed on Mike’s memory. It was the day all his hopes and dreams were finally realised – the day Jessie moved under her own steam for the very first time in 23 years.

For the railway enthusiast who had a lifelong emotional attachment to the locomotive which he had rescued from the scrapheap, it was understandably an emotional moment.

“The first time you steam it after all those years, overcoming problems and finding replacement parts, the day comes when you light it up for the first time, release the brake and open up the regulator and you wonder what’s going to happen. It’s a mixture of excitement and apprehension. When you realise it works – there’s no greater job satisfaction to match it.

“When you spend half your life doing something that is your passion it’s pretty exhilarating and it was such a wonderful moment, especially when Jessie pulled the passenger coaches at Llangollen for the first time.”

Jessie was originally painted black at East Moors, then painted green when she was installed in Splott Park. As part of the restoration, the locomotive was painted maroon, a colour originally used by Great Western Railways and chosen to match the coaches at Llangollen Railway,

“To buy it in 1979 and put it back into service, apart from the thousands of unpaid hours, it has cost me about £15,000,” he says. “Because I could do so much of the work myself, I was able to keep the costs down.

“As a comparison, we did a similar-size engine restoration at Llangollen under contract that arrived as a heap of scrap, and with paid staff working on it that cost around a quarter of a million to bring back into service.”

You may think this is the closing page in the story of the little engine that has led an incredible life. Mike’s 23-year restoration project may have brought Jessie back to life, but this magical tale has one more delightful plot twist.

For a locomotive that generations of children loved playing on in a park in Cardiff, the final chapter of Jessie’s story is as unexpected as it is brilliantly fitting.

If you want to visit Jessie nowadays, she is completely unrecognisable as the maroon engine that was restored with such love by Mike Pearce.

She’s also undergone something of a gender reassignment, as Jessie now spends her days thrilling new generations of children with a smiley face and unmistakable blue paintwork as the most famous and most loved steam engine on the planet – Thomas the Tank Engine.

When I finally get to meet Mike in person at Llangollen Railway Station, he’s surrounded by excited children eager to meet their hero. That’s Thomas, not Mike, of course, although they are happy to wave to the engine driver and his team as they take hordes of excited kids up and down the line.

It’s Thomas the Tank Engine weekend in the beautiful town situated on the River Dee, on the edge of the Berwyn mountains, the first of many to be held at preservation railway lines around the UK and Europe up until the end of the year.

Thomas the Tank Engine is big business and everything is purely authentic, with the Fat Controller conducting duties and a pair of anthropomorphic engines also taking part in the fun.

Mike invites me into the cab and it’s wish-fulfilment for me as I’m transported back to the park and the spot I once stood some 40 years earlier.

“Welcome aboard, this is Jessie,” smiles Mike, stepping aside to let me stand on the footplate. And at that precise moment, I couldn’t be any happier. I feel my voice waver and my eyes moisten before I compose myself, as the engine chugs and I catch a blast of heat from the oven as coal is shovelled inside.

As we move serenely up and down the track, with me barely able to contain a smile that would give the Cheshire Cat a run for its money, Mike tells me how Jessie came to become one of the most identifiable of children’s icons.

“There was another engine that was Thomas for quite a few years that ran out of Llangollen,” he says. “It came back here for maintenance in the middle of the season in 2008. It came in for a boiler wash-out and a check-up and it was found to have a leak in the boiler.

“We had a nine-day Thomas event coming to Llangollen and we were in trouble.

“I said to my boss, ‘We could probably convert Jessie to Thomas’, so I designed a set of tanks for it. I measured it up and had it cut to shape and welded it on. We had two weeks to do it.”

It appears that for Jessie to make the transformation into Thomas, not only did the water tanks have to change but also the distinctive dome cover.

“The top of the dome is actually a Chinese wok,” he laughs. “Because you can’t buy anything new in steam preservation, so you have to improvise.

“The two weeks went by in a mad rush and we got it done, just. The night before the event we were finishing painting it.

“It carried on for the rest of that season and all of the next season. Jessie did 18 months as Thomas. In the meantime we repaired the boiler on the other engine and then converted my Thomas back to Jessie.

“The other engine carried on as Thomas for another couple of years, then the owner sold it. He gave me the nod that he was going to do this. I had to get permission from the American owners HIT Entertainment, who had to approve everything. And that was it, Jessie has been Thomas since 2011.”

Where once Jessie entertained children from Cardiff, Thomas’s journeys around the UK and in Europe bring it into contact with thousands of children every year.

“The reaction is always amazing,” says Mike. “When we go to Holland and Denmark, we transport Thomas on a low loader and people stop and wave as we go past.

“Wherever it goes on the continent they have a pilot car leading it. Cars beep their horns and then you see them race past trying to find the nearest lay-by, so they can park up and wait for you to come by, so they can take pictures.

“It’s funny – when we’re on the ferry, we’re always waved through cheerily by customs who always have big smiles on their faces. We could probably smuggle anything on it if we wanted to and get away with it,” he laughs.

He admits the Thomas days are great fun, as much for the engine crew as for the children, it would appear.

“We do camp it up,” he says. “The Fat Controller gets the kids together on the platform. I pretend I’m putting water into the tank and I shout to him that there’s fish in the tank.

“I then stop under the footbridge and have staff with fishing roads taking the pretend fish out of the tank. We also give the children plastic buckets to bring water to pour into the tank. The kids love it and cheer wildly.

“It brings happiness to people from all walks of life,” adds Mike. “Some of the happiest moments have been when an old engine driver has come up on the footplate with us, someone who has spent his whole working life on steam locomotives and the pleasure they get is fantastic.”

Having moved back to south Wales from Llangollen two years ago, this is the final year that Mike’s engine will run as Thomas and he now plans to convert the historic engine back to Jessie.

“It’s been a little retirement plan for me,” he says. “Thomas has been a wonderful product that’s been so popular, but I’m going to bring Jessie back home.”

While not having any concrete plans yet, he has ideas what Jessie could do.

“I’ve got to take it somewhere to run it,” he says. “I’ve got to run it to make money as it’s very expensive to run. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of my own money on it repairing it.

“There are sheds and a track down Barry – Barry Tourist Railway, which runs from Barry Island to Morrison halt – and they’re going to extend that down to Barry Dock station. It’s about a mile and a half.

“I can’t afford to keep it there as it won’t get enough steaming, but there are three railways within an hour’s drive of my house. There’s the Gwili Railway in Carmarthen, there’s the Pontypool and Blaenavon Railway and the Dean Forest Railway, where I was a mechanical engineer for 25 years.

“I’ll try and keep it as near as I can to my home so I can go and visit and repair it and drive it and work on it. I don’t want to send it halfway across the county as it does as Thomas.”

Mike is quick to talk in revered tones about his incredible journey and his debt of gratitude to the 81-year-old steam engine that changed his life forever.

“I’ve been the most fortunate person for the 77 years I’ve been on this planet, the experiences I’ve had. It’s not been a job. I just think to myself, 'How lucky am I to get paid for doing what I’m doing' – and I’m still doing it.

“I look at Jessie as part of my family. I’ve owned it for 38 years. It’s my youngest child. I’ve owned it longer than the steelworks had it.

“But I’m just a custodian of this engine while I’m on this planet. I’ve done my bit.

“I’ve rebuilt it from a heap of scrap to a working engine and it’s given me so many years of pleasure and I’ve seen thousands of people have pleasure out of it as well.

“I hope the next owner carries on and keeps it running for future generations.”