IT LOOKED like the end of the line for Bobby when, as the last of Blackburn's railway horses, he received his redundancy notice 44 years ago.

Next stop for the 13-year-old four-legged British Railways' employee might have been the glue works after his bosses at Blackburn Station decided to save on his £1.25-a-day food bill and replace his muscle with motor power.

But when the Northern Daily Telegraph reported he was being dispensed with, readers rallied round to buy him a happy retirement.

Only a fortnight earlier, six of his stablemates had got the chop, leaving Bobby as the only horse still shunting rail wagons.

Forty years previously, the railways had 180 horses working out of their Blackburn depot.

But though, by the time he approached the last round-up in 1954, Bobby had completed eight years of shunting duties at the station, he found he still had plenty of friends outside.

Previously, the horse had spent more than four years hauling a railways delivery lorry around Blackburn and, said the NDT, had endeared himself to customers wherever he had gone. The story of his demise prompted reader Mrs Joan Hamilton to urge a horses' rest home at Carlisle to come to his rescue. And when it was reported that the organisation, the Humane Educational Society, needed £50 - equal to £778 today - to buy Bobby from British Rail, donations flowed in. Typical was the 50 shillings (£2.50) raised by workers at Blackburn's wholesale fruit and vegetable market. In the end, the fund had money to spare - which the society used towards saving a horse at Leigh that was in danger of being destroyed.

For Bobby, it meant a future in the Cumberland dales where, said the society, he would be found a little light work.

Two years later, the last of Blackburn Corporation's horses, working for the Cleansing Department, were sold off. But one, a 25-year-old called Peter who had missed only four working days in his 20 years' hauling refuse carts, was allowed to stay on in retirement at Witton Park, where he was stabled. The council decided horses were uneconomic when they found they could replace them with battery-driven carts to carry waste from the town's markets at a cost of just eight old pence a day.

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