HOW KEY IS 90MPH?

With no more 90mph runs planned this year, and understandable lack of certainty about the future strategy, there’s little doubt that April 14’s failure represents a setback for a longstanding ambition of the A1 Trust. As an idea of just how significant that ambition has been, after Tornado reached 100mph during its trial for 90mph running in April last year, trustee Mark Allatt told this magazine that the overnight events marked the “culmination of the project that we launched in 1990.” “We said we were going to build a Peppercorn Class ‘A1’,” he continued, “we said we were going to run her on the main line and on preserved lines, and we said we were going to run her at express passenger speeds – and that was 90 – and we’ve done it. And in fact we’ve gone a bit faster than that!” In the same issue (SR466), ops director Graeme Bunker put the cost of getting to that point as “well over £100,000” – not including volunteer input. Taking the ‘Heritage Lottery Fund model’ as a measure of that contribution, he reckoned the total figure to be more than £¼m. Although nowhere near the scale of the millions needed to build the ‘A1’ in the first place, that gives some idea of the work behind the project. Tornado has been carefully balanced to minimise its effect on the track (“the ‘A1’ at 90mph produces slightly less vertical force than an ‘A4’ at 75mph” – Graeme Bunker), a study of bridges carried out, the engine fitted with brighter lights than normal, it’s been measured, and of course tried out… So there’s no question that significant work, over a period of years, has gone into making 90mph possible; not least in working through the processes to persuade today’s railway to allow it to happen. So yes, any uncertainty is surely a blow. Yet what would any question mark over future higher speed running mean in terms of the justification behind the project in the first place? For the A1 Trust has always been keen to point out that the case for lifting the maximum steam speed from 75mph was driven by practical reasons. Indeed, instead of the limited 90mph status granted to Bittern in 2013 specifically to allow the ‘A4’ to celebrate Mallard’s 75th anniversary with a trio of trips, the

impetus behind the ‘A1’ scheme was to allow No. 60163 the permanent ability to achieve better pathing. In SR466, the engine’s ops director explained how space for steam to run on the main line was being gobbled up not only by more expresses, but also by more freight filling the schedules that steam traditionally slotted into. By upping the speed, rather than simply accepting the lengthened timings in which charters were pushed out to a five-plus hour journey between London and York, “90mph should allow us to get back down to the four-hour timing – though probably only with stops at Potters Bar and Peterborough, not Stevenage.” Plus, he said, the point was “not to thrash the engine” but about being able “to run as much as commercially possible on places like the East Coast Main Line. It’s about a train leaving at a sensible time, rather than before you normally get up for work.” That thinking was borne out by April 14’s path for the ‘Ebor Flyer’. With a stop at Potters Bar it foresaw an arrival in York at 11.25am – and that after a departure from King’s Cross at 8.07am. So would any knock-back to 90mph running inevitably mean ever-slower paths and being squeezed from the main lines? Well, it certainly wouldn’t help, and experience in recent years hasn’t been encouraging – but in that very same issue Down Main flagged up that Network Rail was now moving towards something we had first mooted way back in 2014: guaranteed paths. Since then, that has been further firmed up. Would such paths negate all the benefits of being able to run up to 90mph? Surely not. But could they help act against the squeeze? Done right, yes of course. None of which should be taken to mean 90mph is off the table. Indeed, that has categorically not been said; after all, investigations are ongoing. With those the focus, neither the fact that no more 90mph is planned for this year, nor that the trust says it has not yet formulated a future strategy on this, mean the end of an ambition. Indeed, remember that although it says it will keep an open mind, the organisation says it has yet to see evidence to suggest that the failure was speed-related. So a setback? For sure. But how much of one – that remains unclear.