AN old war hero proved it still had plenty of steam as Severn Valley Railway unveiled its summer timetable.

Veteran locomotive 48773 steamed into the railway's Kidderminster station on its 100,000th mile service since joining the SVR to launch the summer schedule.

The engine, dubbed one of the locomotives which won the war, was saved from the scrapyard by the then fledgling SVR and has been a regular on the rails since.

SVR traffic manager Dewi Jones said: "The children who first came to the SVR as passengers in the early 70s and rode on trains hauled by the locomotive have now grown up.

"But to all intents and purposes the locomotive itself hasn't."

The engine was built in 1940 for wartime service in France but transferred to Iran where it spent three years on the gruelling Trans-Iranian Railway.

It was then transferred to the Suez Canal zone for the remainder of the war and returned to Britain in 1952.

The engine, which was dedicated as a war memorial by the Dean of Hereford in 1986, narrowly escaped becoming scrap when steam trains were changed to diesel in 1969.