A locomotive tender set out on its journey aboard a low loader yesterday to be reunited with its steam engine.

The five-and-a-half-ton wagon left foundry engineers Acetarc in Dalton Lane, Keighley, where it has been under construction for about two months.

It was bound for the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway at Haworth, where it will eventually become part of the steam engine City of Wells.

Engineers and volunteer workers at the heritage railway will now work on preparing it to be attached to its bogeys.

Acetarc director Steven Harker, whose father Ken founded the company in 1967, said: “We had the old designer’s drawings which we re-drew and got approved by the railway.

“Essentially, the tender is the original design. We have retained some of the old components including the doors for compartments used by the fireman and driver.”

It was one of a number of projects the company had carried out for the railway, and the biggest to date.

Other commissions in the town included fabricating the dome for Keighley mosque.

The tender was taken on a low loader to the KWVR works at Haworth where City of Wells has been under restoration for ten years and still has another two years to go, said a KWVR spokesman.

City of Wells is owned by a consortium of KWVR members and is named after the city in Somerset.

It was built by British Railways and named City of Wells following a ceremony in the city’s Priory Road station in 1949.

It was used to draw the Golden Arrow service between London and the continent, and was withdrawn from service in 1964, and rescued from a scrapyard in 1971.