Alan,

Have you come across any details of Kestrel's service in Russia? The last I heard she'd been dumped somwhere near Leningrad and that was in 1982!

As the Russians seem to treat rolling stock as a sort of mobile scrapyard or strategic steel reserve I'm pretty sure that if that story was true then, alas, she is no more...

Somewhere round here I've got some documents from the Ministry of Railways about her work in Russia. Clears up a few contentious dates as well from what I remember.

I never managed to find any pictures of her time in the USSR though.

Steph