A Leyland man has built a £20k replica of the GWR King Class steam train

Vic Whittaker, 79, spent two years and 2,000 hours building an exact replica of the Great Western Railway 6000 Class locomotive.

The 150kg train, which is made out of brass, iron and copper, is kept in his workshop.

Once a week, the train is available for visitors to ride at Worden Park in Leyland, Lancashire.

Vic spent around £5,000 on the materials and used brass and cast-iron for the chassis and copper for the boiler.

The boiler even runs on coal, just like a real steam-train.

The Leyland Society of Model Engineers, a hobbyist club of which Vic is a member, is licensed to operate their trains in Worden Park and passengers can donate for the society to buy coal.

Footage shows the train's maiden voyage on March 19.

If Vic wanted to part with it, the miniature train could sell up for the tidy sum of £20,000.

John Barr, chairman of the Leyland Society of Model Engineers, said: "These trains usually sell for about £15,000 to £20,000, and Vic's is on the nicer end.

"There's an auction house called Druitt's and I recall a bigger one of these selling for a quarter of a million pounds."

Vic, a retired electrical engineer, has been building miniature trains since 2004.

Vic has two other smaller engines that he built previously and keeps all his trains at home.

Vic, who is from Leyland, Lancashire, said: "I could sell it for about £20,000, but I don't want this to be business. I would never sell the train."

The train required an astounding amount of detail as the pieces would have to be accurate to about one-tenth of a millimetre to function correctly.

Vic added: "I spend quite a lot of hours a day building. If it's raining, I spend a long time on it. If it isn't it will be a few less.

"I've always been an engineer. I've always associated myself with large scale engineering and I suppose I wanted to build something that actually works.