29/08/2021
This great piece on the Flying Scotsman first appeared a few years ago in Jeremy Clarkson’s I Know You Got Soul. We’ve taken the liberty of changing the last paragraph…
Trainspotters. You still see them today, occasionally. Hunched over their Tupperware sandwich boxes and their soup at the end of railway platforms, their anorak hoods pulled tight to keep out the worst of the rain and the wind. And one word comes into your mind: why?
If I’m drunk, I can just about understand the mentality of the planespotter. There are all sorts of military aircraft to jot down in your notebook. But there are no fighter trains, no stealth locomotives. These days a train is a train is a train. A good train is one that arrives on time; a bad train is one that doesn’t turn up at all.
In the olden days, when there were lots of different railway companies and no such thing as economies of scale, it was a world of Jenny Agutter appearing out of the steam and Bernard Cribbins watering the station geraniums.
Back then there were express trains, and locomotives used to haul coal, and the ones you saw in Yorkshire were completely different from the ones you saw in South Wales.
You could meet your weird-beard mates in the snug bar of The Broken Conrod and reminisce about the day you saw the Atlantic Class 4-6-2 in the WRONG livery!!! There was a point to trainspotting. Not a very big one, I admit, and not a very sharp one either, but a point nevertheless.
Now though, the spottiest teenagers can spend their evenings downloading po*******hy from the internet. In fact if push came to shove, I bet you could only name one of the 660,000 steam locomotives that have been made around the world. The Gresley Pacific 4472. Better known as the Flying Scotsman.
For those who were born in Doncaster – Kevin Keegan, Diana Rigg and, er, me – it’s a bit galling to know that the town’s most famous son is, in fact, a train, and not a very good one either.
It was chosen to represent the London & North Eastern Railway company at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, not because it was their finest achievement but because they needed something and the Scotsman was broken at the time.
After the show it was repaired and selected to represent the LNER again, in a speed-and-economy race against the best of the best from the Great Western Railway. The northern boy turned out to be slower and more coal hungry than its southern rival.
Of course, the Flying Scotsman’s designers and owners said this was irrelevant. As was the way with the world’s steamship companies, they said they didn’t go in for speed records because this would mean pushing the machinery beyond its limit and that would be dangerous. Yeah right.
In fact they quietly took their engine back to its Doncaster birthplace and fettled it a bit to make it faster. And what’s more, they fitted a corridor in the coal tender that was dragged behind the engine so the crew could leave the footplate of the locomotive and reach the front carriage without having to stop. This meant driver changes could be done on the move.
And this meant that in 1928 the Flying Scotsman set a record by doing 392.7 miles from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. Non-stop. In a whisker over eight hours. The press went mad. The public fainted. The Flying Scotsman had started to make a name for itself.
It was even chosen as the star of Britain’s first ever talking movie, called the Flying Scotsman. I could tell you what it was about. But that would be like trying to explain The Matrix, so I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that as the thirties dawned the Flying Scotsman was a national icon.
But then disaster. News filtered through from Germany of a new diesel locomotive that had just covered the 178 miles from Berlin to Hamburg at an incredible average speed of 77.4 mph. It was one thing being beaten by a bunch of southern poufs, but quite another being beaten by the Hun. So, to show Jerry who was boss, the Flying Scotsman set off for Leeds. It averaged just 72 mph on the way north and failed again on the way south. But while attempting one record it inadvertently broke another. It became the first train, ever, to do 100 mph. 147 tons doing the ton. This time it was a lead item on the BBC’s nine o’clock news and people listening died of excitement.
After the glory days 4472 became just another train plodding up and down the East Coast line until, by 1961, he was just another engine. He was even overlooked by a commission set up to decide which locomotives should be preserved in museums as diesel took over. They said there was only room for one Gresley Pacific and that would be the Mallard, which held the speed record by that time.
And so, on 14 January 1963, with a whopping 2.1 million miles on the clock, the Flying Scotsman was withdrawn from service. No one cared. Except for the men on railway platforms, who downed their Tupperware and demanded action. ‘You can’t just scrap him,’ they wailed.
Happily, their protest reached the attention of a Doncaster boy called Alan Pegler, who bought the engine for £3,000 – only slightly less than half what it had cost to build. He carried on running him, as a sort of joyride experience, and I’m glad about that because it meant I got a chance to see him thundering around from time to time. Somewhere, although I’ve no idea where, I have a collection of pennies that I put on the line to be squashed by the
Flying Scotsman.
It’s funny. I was only seven at the time – what were my parents doing allowing me to play on railway lines? – but I knew the Flying Scotsman was special somehow. I didn’t know about the speed and endurance records. I didn’t know about the British Empire Exhibition. And to be honest I preferred the Buck Rogers Deltic diesel engines that were belting through Doncaster in those days.
And yet, the Flying Scotsman certainly had something. Maybe it’s because he huffed and puffed, giving the sense that a) he was a dragon and that b) he was alive. More likely, though, I was drawn to his beauty.
Francis Bacon once said there is no beauty that hath not some strangeness to its proportion. Cameron Diaz proves that – she’s got a mouth like a slice of watermelon. But the Flying Scotsman proves it to be wrong. There is no strangeness at all. He is exquisite to behold, partly because he is so nicely balanced and partly because he seems to shout, ‘I AM VERY POWERFUL.’
Over the years the Flying Scotsman has travelled the world and been owned by pretty well everyone except my wife, and possibly Kate Moss. As I write he’s for sale again, for a not inconsiderable £2.5 million.
That may seem a lot for something that no longer has a purpose, even if he is a piece of Britain’s engineering heritage. But he is not simply a machine. Like an Aston Martin DB7 or an F-16 fighter, he works as an art form too, a piece of sculpture, and he’s a piece of sculpture you can still ride on, by visiting East Lancashire Railway this weekend…
