Lizzy’s forgotten feat: 400 miles at 70mph, 84 years ago!
Anticipating Hornby’s newly released and highly detailed OO scale models of Stanier’s ‘Princess Royal’ Pacifics, Pete Kelly delves into Mortons’ railway archive to recall a record-breaking feat in 1936 by No. 6201 Princess Elizabeth.
MANY years ago when I was 13, Mr Percival, our English master, gave us each the task of writing a 1000 word essay about‘something exciting’for our homework. At the time, like many others, I was a keen locospotter, and could think of nothing more exciting than cycling down to Warrington’s Bank Quay station in the pouring rain, notebook in hand, to await the arrival of the next train!
Within a few minutes a very grimy ‘Princess Royal’ Pacific, No. 46211 Queen Maud – its tiny curved nameplate almost lost against the vast bulk of its boiler – came in from the north with a very long train and drew to a halt. Within seconds, an ear-splitting eruption of pure white steam was ejected from its safetyvalve cluster to produce an amazing contrast against the dark, leaden sky as passengers disembarked and embarked to a fusillade of slamming carriage doors.
After a few minutes, a deepthroated Stanier whistle note answered the ‘right away’ and the big Pacific surged forward, but almost immediately broke into a violent bout of wheelslip as the combination of wet rails, the start of the rising gradient to clear the distant Manchester Ship Canal bridge and the heavy train temporarily won the adhesion battle. Another try, another slip, and then the locomotive just seemed to gather up its skirts, and I could still hear the bark of the accelerating Queen Maud as it finally crested the rise and disappeared from sight.
The essay was duly written and handed in, but after missing the following class thanks to a ‘dental appointment’ I was astonished to hear that old Percy had been so taken with it that he’d read it out in front of the whole class and I wasn’t there to hear it. Served me right for pulling a bunk!
Record run
Everyone with the slightest interest in railways knows that the world speed record for steam, at just over 126mph, was set up by Gresley’s three-cylinder A4 Pacific No. 4468 Mallard down Stoke Bank, between Little Bytham and Essendine, on July 3, 1938.
The ‘brake test’ run, with the old North Eastern Railway’s dynamometer car and six coaches in tow, was meant to terminate at King’s Cross, but after driver Joe Duddington and inspector Sid Jenkins detected signs of an overheated middle big end bearing soon after the feat was achieved, the four-month-old No. 4468 was taken off at Peterborough to be returned to Doncaster for repairs, and an Ivatt Atlantic took the train forward.
Downhill or not, 126mph was a truly remarkable top speed, and the bearing incident, not entirely unexpected, in no way detracted from the well-proven consistent highspeed qualities of the streamlined A4s, for which 90 and 100mph running on top link duties remained commonplace even into British Railways days.
Not so commonly known, but equally remarkable in its own way, was a long-distance record that was set up by the LMS over the longer and rather more challenging West Coast route more than 18 months previously when, over two consecutive nonstop runs on November 15 and 16, 1936, with driver Tom Clarke and fireman Charles Fleet on the footplate both ways, Stanier ‘Princess Royal’ Pacific No 6201 Princess Elizabeth completed the 802.8 miles from London Euston to Glasgow Central and back in well under six hours each way to establish a long distance steam speed record.
When he moved from the Great Western Railway’s Swindon Works, where he had been assistant to Charles Collett, to become chief mechanical engineer of the London Midland & Scottish Railway on January 1, 1931, William Arthur Stanier (who was knighted in 1943) was faced with introducing a range of modern standard locomotive designs, including powerful new express types that could work Anglo-scottish expresses right through between London and Glasgow. Before his arrival, the longest LMS working undertaken by a single locomotive had been the 299 miles between Euston and Carlisle.
Introduced in 1933, the massive Princess Royal Pacifics, whose design bore many similarities to those of the Great Western ‘King’ class 4-6-0s of 1927, including the same cylinder dimensions, boiler pressure and driving wheel diameter, had even bigger boilers and fireboxes which necessitated the 4-6-2 wheel arrangement to carry them, and after trial running and boiler modifications, they became the locomotives to do the job.
In the January 1937 issue of
Heritage Railway’s now sister publication The Railway Magazine, timing graphs recorded by the legendary D S Barrie showed that, hauling a similar seven-coach load to
Mallard’s, the locomotive completed the northbound journey in five hours 53min 15sec against the scheduled six hours, its 225-ton train consisting of dynamometer car, kitchen car and five standard stock coaches.
Even more remarkably, with an extra coach added the following day, making the tare up to 255 tons, the southbound run was completed in five hours 44min 15 sec, an average of 70.15mph, to establish a longdistance steam speed record which, like Mallard’s, stands to this day.
Although not a single three-figure speed was attained in either direction, the timing logs highlighted the