Building up a head of steam for Edinburgh
It is perhaps the most photographed train of all, but these pictures show a rarely-seen side of Flying Scotsman. David Behrens reports.
IT WAS a date that has lived in railway history – the first nonstop journey from London to Edinburgh, in eight hours flat.
May 1, 1928 was when the A1 class locomotive 4472 Flying Scotsman first hauled the passenger service of the same name, and as our main picture shows, its return to King’s Cross was a national event.
The main in the suit, presenting a memento to the two drivers and two firemen as a policeman holds back the crowd, is William Whitelaw, chairman of the London and North Eastern Railway and grandfather of the later Home Secretary.
Flying Scotsman was the last word in fast and luxurious travel, and one of today’s collection of rarely-seen pictures shows lunch being served in the first class saloon. As the passengers ate, an on-board barber administered wet shaves and short-back-andsides to gentlemen travellers.
By 1932 the engine’s fame was such that Eric Gill, the eminent sculptor, was prevailed upon to unveil the new nameplate, fashioned in Gill Sans lettering. Given a private life which later saw Gill disgraced, it was not an association that endured.
But the train went from strength to strength, becoming in 1934 the first steam locomotive to be officially recorded at 100mph. The picture on the right shows LNER employees three years earlier, measuring brake horsepower in the onboard Dyanometer carriage, while opposite, the relief driver and firemen try to keep the seats clean while reading the papers in one of the passenger carriages.
Both the locomotive and the service survive to this day. In 2006 the engine entered the workshops of the National Railway Museum in York for a decade-long restoration to the original specification of its designer, Nigel Gresley. Meanwhile, new diesel-electric Azuma trains ply its old route on the east coast main line.