Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  The A4 was, in one sense, nothing more than a super A3, a development of what had gone before. The differences between the two classes, beneath the A4’s distinctive streamlined casing, may have seemed marginal: an inch here and there in the diameter of piston valves and cylinders, a 250 psi rather than a 220 psi boiler. However, the way that Gresley, his chief technical assistant, Bert Spencer, and his chief locomotive draughtsman, Edgar Windle, ensured that steam flowed with minimum pressure-drop losses inside the A4 was most important. The LNER engineers had learned from Chapelon and now applied the Frenchman’s theory very positively to British practice. When the regulator was open fully, steam flowed into the cylinders of the thirty-five A4s at virtually the same pressure at which it was raised in the boiler – these were efficient and economical engines. They were also well built and powerful. Originally designed to rush the 230 ton Silver Jubilee from London to Newcastle, later batches were used to head the most prestigious heavyweight expresses, like the 550 ton Flying Scotsman, on mile-a-minute schedules.

  The Silver Jubilee proved to be very popular – as the train was nearly always full, an extra coach was added – and highly profitable too, earning the LNER a net thirteen shillings per mile, about double the income of a conventional express train. In September 1937, a second streamlined service, the Coronation – ‘We want to go one better than a Pullman,’ said Gresley – was brought into service between London and Edinburgh. The schedule for the 393 miles was six hours, with two stops going north and one heading south, and with the really fast running being made over the 188 miles from King’s Cross to York (157 minutes, at an average of 71.9 mph, the fastest scheduled service in Britain). This was made all the more impressive by the fact that the new nine-coach train, complete with a streamlined observation car at its tail end, weighed 325 tons, 40 per cent more than the Silver Jubilee. Again, the reliability of the A4s was on public show: forty-eight of the first fifty-one runs were made behind the uncomplaining 4491 Commonwealth of Australia.

  What these streamliners proved is not simply that steam could be run very fast, but that such inspired and demanding running could be expected as a matter of course, day in, day out. The A4s laid down a challenge for protagonists of rival forms of railway traction and they allayed the railways’ own fears concerning the contemporary threat from the air. Airlines were still in their infancy in Britain and every flight was still a rather uncomfortable and even hair-raising adventure. The first regular Anglo-Scottish service, operated by the Railway Air Service, began on 20 August 1934, when a pair of brand new de Havilland DH 86 Express four-engine, ten-seat biplanes took off from Renfrew, near Glasgow, on what should have been a flight of four and a quarter hours to Croydon Airport, via Belfast, Manchester, and Birmingham. Gale-force winds meant that both flights had to be abandoned at Manchester, although one plane did finally get through to Croydon. These were early days, but it does seem a shame that, despite having such a lead over the airlines in the mid-1930s, the railways – or those charged with looking after them – let this go. If steam development alone had been kept up to the pace Gresley set in the 1930s, who knows how fast and glamorous train travel in Britain would have been in 1962, let alone 2012?

  Just how fast a Gresley locomotive could run was demonstrated on 3 July 1938, when, during high-speed brake tests, 4468 Mallard, a brand-new locomotive fitted with double Kylchap exhaust and chimney, was sent from a starting point four miles north of Grantham over Stoke summit with a seven-coach train, including the LNER’s veteran dynamometer car (used for recording locomotive performance), weighing 240 tons, with driver Duddington at the controls and fireman Bray on the shovel. The crew were from Doncaster. Accelerating rapidly to pass the summit at 74.5 mph, Duddington took Mallard up to 125 mph, before slowing down for the curve at Essendine. The dynamometer recorded a momentary 126 mph, enough – just enough – for the LNER to claim a world record for steam traction. The previous year, one of Adolf Wolff’s streamlined Deutsche Reichsbahn 05 class 4-6-4s had reached 200.4 kph (124.5 mph). Although Wolff was on very friendly terms with his essentially apolitical British counterparts, there was inevitably much crowing as well as cheering in the British press. We had beaten the Germans.

  Worked hard up Stoke – a longer run up would have made things easier for the locomotive and her crew – Mallard came to a stand at Peterborough, with an overheated connecting-rod big end detected when steam was shut off thirteen miles away for the Essendine slack. This was because of the very high stress reversal forces caused when steam was shut off completely. (Adolf Wolff was later to disclose that the 05s had suffered from the same problem until drivers were told never to close the regulator fully when braking from above 90 mph.) As it was, Mallard was quickly repaired and back in regular service almost immediately after her record run. The test train, meanwhile, continued to King’s Cross behind a veteran Ivatt Atlantic – and staff on board the dynamometer car were quick to hand out photographs of Mallard in case the press published images of the Atlantic instead of the Pacific.

  Given an unrestricted run up to Stoke, Mallard may have well reached 130 mph or more. This performance, though, had demanded, at one stage, an output of 3,100 ihp, meaning that the Kylchap-fitted A4s were one of a very select band of 3,000 hp British steam locomotives. The others were the Stanier Coronations, and – just – Bulleid’s Merchant Navy Pacifics and Arthur Peppercorn’s post-war A1s. The Kylchap exhaust gave the A4s a 300 ihp boost. Indeed, on one occasion in 1963, the last year the A4s ran from King’s Cross, Mallard was at the head of the eleven-coach, 405 ton, 14.00 Newcastle express. A signal stop before Stevenage and other signal and permanent-way restrictions delayed the train. Late through Peterborough, Mallard, with driver Coe of King’s Cross, arrived in Grantham just ahead of time. Climbing Stoke at between 80 and 82 mph, with a slight drop on the final 1-in-178 rise to the summit, Mallard was producing a sustained 2,450 bhp, with a maximum of about 3,200 ihp.

  During the Second World War, the A4s performed heroically, displaying herculean muscle. The Rev. G. C. Stead timed 4901 Capercaillie at the head of a twenty-one-coach Flying Scotsman, weighing 730 tons, covering a 25 mile stretch of more or less level track between Darlington and York in just under twenty minutes, at an average speed of 76 mph. This required a continuous output of 1,700 dbhp, or 2,400 ihp. From the outbreak of the war, speed was nominally limited to 60 mph, but the Flaman recording speedometers had been removed and stored.

  As for Silver Link, on 5 April 1940, this high-speed record-breaker was charged with lifting a twenty-five-coach, 850 ton express out of King’s Cross on a 1-in-105 gradient. It took no fewer than sixteen minutes to climb the 2.5 miles to Finsbury Park, but once on the move from Potters Bar, the A4 was running well and was just eleven minutes late on stopping at Grantham, having averaged 50 mph from Finsbury Park. This huge train was then worked on to Newcastle – a further 163 miles – losing just four minutes on its schedule.

  The A4s continued to impress in British Railways days. A non-stop, eleven-coach, 390 ton express, the Elizabethan, averaged a mile a minute from London to Edinburgh, demanding the very best from crews, signalmen, shed staff, and operating management at a time when the railways were still struggling to get up to speed after the war and the long period of austerity. A twenty-minute black-and-white film of the train, Elizabethan Express, directed by Tony Thompson and produced by Edgar Anstey, was made by British Transport Films in 1954. The cheeky verse commentary by Paul Le Saux is irritating, but the shots of Silver Fox galloping effortlessly up the east coast main line, and life aboard an express train in the era before mobile phones, booming personal stereos, and non-stop announcements, are nothing less than delightful. To many, steam expresses were always more than a way of getting from A to B in the shortest possible time.

  Gresley produced a number of other fine engines for the LNER, including the fast and powerful three-cylinder V2 class 2-6-2s of 1936, with slightly shortened A3 boilers and 6 ft 2 in driving wheels, the first named Green Arro
w after a new high-speed main-line goods service running at up to 60 mph. A further 183 were built. Like all Gresley’s big locomotives, they proved invaluable during the war, when trains could be very heavy indeed, and the 2-6-2s could stand in for Pacifics. For service over the tortuous but beautiful Scottish line from Glasgow to Mallaig via Fort William, Gresley devised the three-cylinder K4 class 2-6-0s with 5 ft 2 in driving wheels. These six compact engines, built between 1936 and 1939, had a tractive effort of 36,599 lb, and were very useful on a line with many starts and stops, tight curves, steep gradients, and multiple speed restrictions. They also meant that train weights for a single locomotive could be raised from 220 to 300 tons.

  Gresley’s final shot at an all-purpose locomotive primarily for secondary lines was the three-cylinder V4 class 2-6-2, an exquisitely engineered class of just two prototype locomotives, the first named Bantam Cock, the second nicknamed Bantam Hen. The idea was that these bantamweights would be able to work very nearly 80 per cent of the LNER’s route mileage, bringing modern traction to lines often reliant on Victorian locomotives.

  Bantam Cock made her debut just weeks before Gresley died. There is no doubt that the great engineer had become exhausted as the war progressed. Believing it to be his duty to put in as much effort as anyone else, he took to working seven days a week, despite a known heart problem. There was still so much to do. A mechanically fired three-cylinder 4-8-2, with a P2 boiler, for heavy passenger services, was on the drawing board, as well as an A4 with its boiler pressed to 275 psi to give a 10 per cent higher tractive effort. Meanwhile, the first main-line electric locomotive designed under Gresley’s supervision ran for the first time on the Manchester to Sheffield line in February 1941. In March, Bulleid invited Gresley to the unveiling of his first Pacific, Channel Packet, but his old boss and friend was unable to attend. He died on 5 April 1941 and was buried alongside his wife in the churchyard at Netherseal.

  Gresley was that glorious English thing, a radical in the unaffected guise of a country gentleman with an office and a club, or two, in town. A lieutenant colonel in the Engineer and Railway Staff Corps in the First World War, captain of his local golf club when he lived with his family in Hadley Wood, a member of the Junior Carlton Club and Brooke’s, an honorary DSc and a knight of the realm, he reinvigorated the British steam locomotive to remarkable effect. Like Churchward, he introduced the best, or most appropriate, developments from France and the United States. He experimented continually and had high hopes of setting up, with William Stanier of the LMS, a national locomotive testing plant to ensure that the engines of the future would be scientifically evaluated. Work on such a plant began at Rugby in 1938, but was halted after the declaration of war in September 1939. When the facility was completed in 1948, the first locomotive to be tested was the A4 Pacific Sir Nigel Gresley.

  Gresley brought dash and panache to steam engineering and design, and while aware that electric traction was on the way – he actively promoted it – he was determined to raise the standard of steam design to new heights. His three-cylinder locomotives were to be much maligned by Edward Thompson, his immediate successor at the LNER, on account of their patent conjugated valve gear, which, when properly set up and maintained, was an effective way of eliminating the inaccessible third set of valve gear between the frames of the locomotive and replacing it with a simple horizontal lever system, normally placed in front of the cylinders. And yet those who cared for Gresley’s locomotives at most depots had them working superbly throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s. As late as May 1959, an attempt on the British steam speed record was made when driver Hoole and fireman Hancox of King’s Cross streaked down Stoke Bank at the controls of 60007 Sir Nigel Gresley, at the head of an eight-coach, 295 ton Stephenson Locomotive Society special. Hoole had already allegedly achieved 117 mph in November 1955 with Sir Nigel Gresley at the head of the Tees–Tyne Pullman. In the event, he was still accelerating at 112 mph when he was ordered by Fred Dixon, the locomotive inspector on the footplate, to ease off. Might Mallard’s record have been broken? We will never know; but it is hard not to think of the spirit of Sir Nigel Gresley himself, an engineer and railway enthusiast to the core, willing on the locomotive that bore his name – and which still runs on main-line specials today – to unprecedented heights.

  *

  Another locomotive that might have broken Mallard’s record was 6220 Coronation, the magisterial LMS four-cylinder Pacific which seems to have reached 114 mph approaching Crewe station one summer day in 1937, when it was brand-new. The streamlined locomotive, as free steaming as an A4 and with even greater power, was accelerating well and given the kind of long downhill run the LNER enjoyed between Grantham and Peterborough, it might well have crested 120 mph and possibly run faster than that. One of a class of thirty-eight express passenger locomotives built at Crewe between 1937 and 1948, the Coronation class 4-6-2s were, along with Gresley’s A4s, among the greatest of all British steam engines. Designed under the direction of Sir William Stanier and named after British cities, British royalty, and, of course, the coronation of King George VI in 1937, these 105 ton, 3,000 hp, 100 mph machines were true monarchs of the rails.

  The Coronations were certainly special and were much loved by everyone who came into contact with them, and yet they were no more and no less than the crowning glory of a fleet of highly standardized modern locomotives put into service by the LMS between 1933 and the company’s absorption into British Railways in 1948. Even then, as we will see, these Stanier locomotives – which ranged from powerful, compact 2-6-4 tank engines through mixed-traffic 4-6-0s and 2-8-0s designed for heavy freight duties and wartime service in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, to express passenger three-cylinder 4-6-0s and heavy-duty Pacifics – were to be the direct inspiration for the British Railways Standard class locomotives built up until 1960.

  Looking back, the design and general arrangement of these fine and purposeful machines owed an incalculable debt to Churchward and the GWR. This was hardly surprising, for William Stanier was a GWR man through and through, from his birth at Swindon in March 1876 – three months before Gresley was born in Derbyshire – until, at the age of fifty-five, he was tempted away to take up the post of chief mechanical engineer of the LMS.

  The move must have been a wrench for Stanier. He liked to say that he had the letters G W R embroidered in the seat of his trousers. The son of W. H. Stanier, a GWR man who had held many posts on the railway, including that of chief clerk, Stanier joined the company in 1892, the year that Brunel’s 7 ft 0¼ in broad gauge finally gave way to the national standard gauge of 4 ft 8½ in. Apprenticed at the age of sixteen, he rose to be works manager at Swindon and rebuilt the famous engineering works so that by 1923, when the vast majority of Britain’s railways were grouped into four regional companies, the Big Four, it was the most advanced in the country.

  Stanier became assistant to Charles Collett in 1921. He was soon in the thick of locomotive design. Collett was hard hit by the death of his wife in 1923 and this very private man retreated ever further into himself. It was left to Stanier to see the new Castle class 4-6-0 through its final design and production. By this time, Stanier, who had loved working with tools since he was a toddler, was one of the best railway engineering production managers in the country. More than that, he was also a major figure in Swindon society, a largely self-contained world which revolved almost entirely around the GWR. A happily married father of two children, he was a founder member and president of the Swindon Rotary Club, a governor of Swindon secondary school, a director of both the Swindon Gas Company and the Swindon Permanent Building Society, and chairman of the local Toc H committee (the Christian fellowship and charity founded by Neville Talbot and Philip ‘Tubby’ Clayton, two First World War army chaplains). He took a keen interest, as his father had done, in the education of the working men of the GWR, and gave many technical addresses. A keen swimmer, tennis player, and ice-skater, Stanier was also president of the Swindon rugby and athlet
ics clubs. He was to remain robust, decisive, and a famously fast walker, until his early eighties. And, despite a superficially brusque manner when he was in a hurry, as he often was, Stanier was, without the shadow of a doubt, a kind, warm, and good-natured man.

  How, then, could he consider leaving Swindon as he did in 1932, so late in his career? The answer was twofold. First, Stanier was just five years younger than his chief, Collett, who had no interest in retiring before he was seventy, in 1941. Stanier would have stepped into Collett’s shoes, but he would have enjoyed just a very few years to make his mark before his own retirement. Second, the offer put to him by the LMS was impossible to refuse.

  Stanier had been groomed for the LMS job by Sir Harold Hartley, a vice president of the LMS and the railway’s director of scientific research, who was also a fellow of the Royal Society, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and, as Brigadier General Hartley, had been controller of the chemical warfare department during the First World War. Hartley had been assigned the task of finding a new chief mechanical engineer for the LMS by the extraordinary Sir Josiah Stamp, who was the son of a railway-station bookstall manager from Wigan and in 1926 had moved to the LMS as its first president from Nobel Industries Ltd (which later became Imperial Chemical Industries, or ICI – later, in 1961, a director of ICI, Richard Beeching, would become the much-criticized chairman of the board of British Railways).

  The LMS was by far the biggest of the Big Four, but, unlike the GWR, it was an empire bristling with rivalries and possessed a fleet of disparate locomotives designed by engineers from Derby, Crewe, Horwich, and other works, who seemed incapable of seeing eye to eye. The public referred to the LMS as an ‘’ell of a mess’. By 1932 it was way past time to sort out a situation that had not significantly improved since the company had been formed in 1923. Although there were a number of very able locomotive engineers from its constituent companies at work in the LMS, the various design departments had still to gel. They needed to be forced to do so, but the man who could achieve this had yet to be found.