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Hawkesbury trainer Terry Croft turned the clock back to where it all began when he won his first metropolitan race in five years at Rosehill on Saturday.

One of Hawkesbury's longest serving trainers, Croft broke his city drought when his "bread and butter" horse No Escape scored in the last race on the Rosehill program to record his seventh winner for the current season.

Croft has enjoyed a long racing career that began almost 50 years ago.

"I started at Rosehill with trainer Bede Horan in 1971," Croft recalled. "It's always nice to have a horse good enough to go back there and win a race, especially on a Saturday.

"I started riding work at Hawkesbury in the 1970s along with Garry White (fellow Hawkesbury trainer) after kicking off with Bede."

Croft rode as an amateur jockey before embarking on a training career and competed in the last Corinthian Handicap ever run at Randwick in the 1970s.

The Corinthian was a traditional race for amateur jockeys and was a feature of the annual Bank Holiday meeting in August.

Croft has been training at Hawkesbury since 1986 after stints training in Queensland at Deagon and Caloundra. He has the distinction of being the first trainer based at the then new Sunshine Coast course to win a race in Brisbane in 1985.

Pedro's Tigress ran fourth at the opening meeting of the Sunshine Coast track and then won at Doomben at her next start.

Croft, who has 14 horses in work at Hawkesbury, had not won a Sydney race since Catseye Surprise scored at Canterbury in 2014.

Only a few months earlier he had purchased No Escape privately for a bargain four-figure amount after he was passed in at Sydney's Classic Yearling Sale.

No Escape has a big following at the Royal Hotel at Richmond near Hawkesbury as the Shellscrape six-year-old is raced by publican Mal Russell and a syndicate which includes a number of regulars at the pub.

Croft may give No Escape his next start in the $50,000 South Grafton Cup next Sunday.

Croft is no stranger to Grafton's famous July carnival as he won there in 2013 with Catseye Surprise and was second with Vite Loni in the Grafton Guineas in 2014.

"He's been a wonderful horse for our stable," Croft said. "That was his seventh win, and he has run nine placings and earned just over $200,000.

"No Escape was immature as a young horse and we didn't race him as a two-year-old. He began his career well into his three-year-old season."