‘SO MUCH ABOUT THE GW WAS PHONEY’

Is David Ward biased against Great Western engines? “I’m not. People say I am.”

The label, he contends, comes because “in the movement generally they always used to ridicule the Great Western… Bernard Staite, they always used to call him ‘the plodder, like the Great Western.’”

The Steam Locomotive Operator’s Association general secretary however, who died in 2009, was in fact “a great chap and he, more than anybody in the preservation movement, bore the brunt of keeping main line steam alive from 1972 to 1994.”

But ‘Wardy’ still reckons much about the Swindon outfit was bunkum.

City of Truro, he argues, “never did 102mph – you read The Railway Magazine of 1934, where Cecil J. Allen analysed it all. He proved it – the rate of acceleration was impossible. It was these sort of claims by GW enthusiasts that got them their name.”

Instead, the former BR steam supremo reckons the real figure reached by the celebrated double-framed 4-4-0 in 1904 was “probably about 92, 93.”

“They reckon [timer] Rous-Marten missed a quarter-mile post. But so much about the Great Western was phoney.”

“You’ve only got to read Gerry Fiennes*, when he went there as general manager. He found they employed three people to do a job which on other railways only required two.”

“‘KGV’s’ reputation wasn’t good at all”, he says of the preserved main line era – and the 4-6-0 that started it, ‘King’ No. 6000. “And even with the other engines, we had a number of failures”.

Nor is he a big fan of Brunswick green: “It was a good livery if it was set off with all the copper caps and the brass safety valve cover and what-not, and the brass trims around the splashers and cab… Put it on an engine that didn’t have [those] and it made it very, very dull to look at. You’ve only got to look at Flying Scotsman now. The main virtue of Brunswick green is that it does not show the dirt.”

Indeed, he argues that while he “wouldn’t suggest painting a ‘King’ in any other colour… it doesn’t look right on a ‘Princess Coronation’ in my view…”

And when it comes to a Gresley ‘Streak’, “I’ve told John Cameron that if you want an ‘A4’, it’s got to be Garter Blue with all the chrome and stainless steel fittings.”

* At various times BR chief operating officer and general manager of the Eastern and Western Regions, who had started on the LNER. Autobiography:

I Tried to Run a Railway.