Rail record-breaker

“Stewards spilt drinks and passengers clutched their seats in excitement,” wrote The Northern Echo’s reporter aboard the first train of the streamline age. “I caught a glimpse of a man tending his cattle in a green field and saw his mouth open in wonder as he stared at us as though our train had sprung from an unbelievable world, in the way that children used to gaze at aeroplanes.”

THAT day – September 27, 1935 – the first of Sir Nigel Gresley’s A4 Pacific engines burst up the East Coast Main Line at record-breaking speeds that were so fast even a plane overhead could not keep up.

“As we dashed along, farms and quiet country places seemed quite out of place,”

said the awe-struck reporter on the front page. “Our ultramodern machine would have been at home among skyscrapers and glass-faced factories.

The Northern Echo’s front page of September 28, 1935, telling how the first A4 engine, Silver Link, pulling the Silver Jubilee train had broken the British speed record

“With the relentless fury of some jungle beast, the train roared on. No one could suppress a thrilled exclamation when the news spread that we had touched 112mph, for it came as a complete surprise, even to LNER officials.”

So smooth was the engine, Silver Link, that the driver, Arthur Taylor, had no idea what speed he was doing. “She rides the rails beautifully,” he later told the Echo’s man.

However, Sir Nigel, who designed the engine and was seated in the first carriage, was well aware. As Silver Link flashed through the Bedfordshire countryside, he squeezed though the narrow corridor he had built in the tender and climbed into the driver’s cab.

“Steady on, old chap,” he is reputed to have said to Mr Taylor. “Do you know you have just done 112mph?”

Sir Nigel Gresley, who designed the A4s

Silver Link was the first of the new-look engines to break the speed records. The last, of course, was Mallard, which has just arrived at Shildon’s Locomotion museum ready for the start of the Great Goodbye exhibition next Saturday.

Sir Nigel – then, of course, plain Herbert Nigel Gresley – was driven to design the A4 engines by two types of competition.

Firstly, the LNER, which ran up the East Coast, was in competition with the LMS, which ran up the West Coast.

The LMS’ Royal Scots engines were probably besting the LNER’s traditional-nosed A1 and A3 class engines, so Sir Nigel needed a speedy response.

Patriotic pride demanded that he also needed a response to The Flying Hamburger – Die Fliegende Hamburger – which was flying along German rails as if it were a Scotsman.

The mid-1930s was the streamline age, just as the late 1960s was the space age and today we are obsessed by our digital age. Even 1930s kitchen appliances were streamlined – so why weren’t steam engines?

Gresley drew on the designs of Ettore Bugatti, the Italian car manufacturer, to help create a streamlined engine. He drew on all the latest advances in steam technology, and he added his own innovations: the tender corridor, which allowed the crew to be changed for a fresh set of lads while the train was in motion, was his idea (apparently, his daughter discovered him squeezing through a tunnel of dining room chairs to work out the minimum dimensions).

ALL his ingenuity came together in the first A4, Silver Link, built in Doncaster.

No engine had ever looked like it nor, with its American tri-note steam whistle, sounded like it.

Gone was LNER’s usual green livery. Silver Link was dressed in three shades of silvery grey in order to commemorate King George V’s silver jubilee. It was to operate a new regal express service from London King’s Cross to Newcastle in four hours dead (one stop: Darlington).

Mallard’s jubilant crew on July 3, 1938, after setting the world steam speed record which still stands. The three men carrying their coats were on the footplate, from left, fireman Tommy Bray, driver Joe Duddington and inspector Sam Jenkins

The Silver Jubilee service was to start on Monday, September 30, 1935, so the Friday before – the 110th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway – they took the new engine for a test burn-up.

“Above raced an aeroplane and even that seemed to be outpaced as our train roared along the rails, rushing ever faster as though it held life of its own and was determined to outstretch its modern rival of the air,” said our man onboard at the dawn of the new era.

“Beside this fantastic monster of the track, other trains which we burst past gave the impression of being pathetically old-fashioned and tired.”

Silver Link covered 464.6 miles a day. It left Newcastle at 10am and arrived at King’s Cross at 2pm, and was ready to return at 5.30pm.

Soon, Doncaster completed three more A4s – Quicksilver, Silver King and Silver Fox – to join it on the Silver Jubilee run.

Two years later, to celebrate King George VI taking to the throne, LNER introduced the Coronation service from London to Edinburgh, and the new A4s which operated it were named in honour of His Majesty’s Empire: Union of South Africa, Dominion of Canada, Empire of India, Commonwealth of Australia, and Dominion of New Zealand.

More A4s were built to run to Leeds to carry the wealthy textile and carpet businessmen into London. These engines were appropriately named Golden Fleece and Golden Shuttle.

In all, between September 1935 and July 1938, 35 A4s were built, each costing about £9,000. Many, like Mallard, were named after birds.

Mallard was an engine with a mission. Fitted with all the latest technology, including Westinghouse fast-acting brakes, it was set up to take back the world speed record from the Germans, whose streamlined 05 class engine had reached 124½mph on the line between Berlin and Hamburg.

Mallard’s date with destiny was July 3, 1938. The driver was Joe Duddington. The fireman was Tommy Bray. The difficulty was that at Grantham there was unscheduled engineering work which meant Mallard had to slow to a crawl (maximum speed: 24mph) instead of building up a head of steam and accelerating.

An advert from The Northern Echo of September 30, 1935, promoting the new streamlined Silver Jubilee service which started that day

Once out of the restriction zone, Mallard hurtled up Stoke Bank and then whizzed down the long, straight stretch of track on the other side.

You can read The Northern Echo’s full report of how Mallard broke the record over the page. “The locomotive was drawing a streamlined train, to which was attached a dynamometer car in which were charts and instruments which confirmed the record,” it says.

“The maximum speed was maintained for 306 yards near Little Bytham station, and was reduced only because of the approaching junction.”

MODERN analysis suggests Mallard was at 125.88mph and may possibly have touched 126mph. Driver Duddington said it could have reached 130mph easily if it hadn’t been for the pesky engineering work and the junction.

The Germans huffed and puffed. They pointed out that Mallard was going down hill whereas their engine had been on the horizontal. They pointed out that afterwards Mallard had required nine days of repairs whereas their engine had set the record unscathed.

In reposte, the British said that the German imposter had only been pulling a train of four coaches weighing 197 tons, whereas Mallard hauled a Coronation service set of seven coaches weighing 240 tons.

It matters not. Just as football’s record books only record the winners of penalty shootouts, so railway record books only name Mallard.

It is officially the fastest steam engine on earth. It is probably the most famous steam engine in this country.

Sir Nigel wanted to have another pop at the world record, but the war broke out, bringing the streamline age to a shuddering end.

The A4s were withdrawn from service, painted austerity black, and then ordered to do mundane jobs. Maintenance became routine and begrudging.

Mallard, behind a Sunter vehicle, leaves Clapham Railway Museum, in London, on its way to York

These pedigrees – designed to pull the rich and the fashionable in luxury and at speed – were just too extravagant at a time when the war effort required workhorses.

At York on April 28, 1942, one of the A4s – Sir Ralph Wedgwood – was struck by a German bomb and destroyed.

Peacetime was little kinder to the other 34 A4s. Their era was over. Diesel was the future.

The first of their class, including Silver Link, were withdrawn in December 1962.

Silver Fox pulled the last A4 express out of King’s Cross on October 29, 1963, and the remaining engines were pensioned off to Scotland to run between Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Their twilight came to an end in September 1966. Twenty- eight were scraped – 13 in Doncaster, two in Darlington and 13 sold to private scrap dealers. Six somehow survived.

Mallard, the great recordbreaker, was sent to the National Museum of British Transport, in Clapham, where it stayed until the National Railway Museum was created at York in the mid-1970s.

Union of South Africa was rescued to run on a private line in Fife. Sir Nigel Gresley was bought by enthusiasts to run main line excursions and regularly runs on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Bittern was also purchased to run in excursions but fell into disrepair in the 1970s only to return to active duty in 2007 after restoration in Hampshire.

Golden Shuttle had the good fortune to be renamed Dwight D Eisenhower in honour of the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces on D-Day. This caught the Americans’ fancy and they took it to New York in 1964.

Dominion of Canada was left to rot behind Darlington’s Bank Top station in 1965-66 before Canada came calling and carried it off to a museum in Montreal.

The German streamlined 05 engine which held the world steam record before Mallard

Next weekend, these six survivors are to be reunited in Shildon for the last time before the transatlantic locos are taken home. It is, therefore, a historic last chance to these fantastic monsters from the streamline age.

• Much of the information in today’s article has been taken from Mallard and the A4 Pacifics by Rob Adamson and Chris Nettleton which is available from the National Railway Museum in York and Shildon for £9.99