Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  Last night I lay a-sleeping

  There came a dream to me –

  I stood within a Steam Shed,

  A marvellous Shed to see.

  The walls were clean and spotless,

  And smoke troughs white as snow,

  And not a spot of grease was seen

  Upon the pits below.

  O Loco Men! O Loco Men!

  Shout loud for well you may –

  ’Twas the Blessed Steam Shed of Paradise

  We all shall see some day.

  Here, the son of the rectory (like so many steam locomotive engineers) invoked the near-religious calling of steam itself.

  Before moving on to the GNR at Doncaster in 1905, Gresley had married Ethel Frances Fullager, a talented young musician and the daughter of a Bolton solicitor. They had four children and lived happily and comfortably. Devastated by Ethel’s death from cancer in 1929, at the early age of fifty-four, Gresley eventually moved to Salisbury Hall, a moated Elizabethan house near St Albans, where, with the help of his daughter, Vi, he entertained in grand style between holidays in Scotland, where he shot, fished, and played golf. They spent every other weekend with the Staniers. He was particularly fond of the mallards that bred and played in the moat at Salisbury Hall, hence the name of the locomotive that was to make him world-famous in 1938.

  Gresley replaced H. A. Ivatt as locomotive superintendent of the GNR in 1911, appointing Oliver Bulleid as his personal technical assistant. The two men were to work closely together until Bulleid left the LNER to become chief mechanical engineer of the Southern Railway at Eastleigh in 1937. Bulleid, a natural innovator, must have encouraged Gresley to push forward with a number of radical new locomotive designs. Between the emergence of the A1 and A3 Pacifics, Doncaster came up with a very fine class numbering just two locomotives. These were the massive, three-cylinder P1 class 2-8-2 goods engines of 1925. Designed to pull hundred-wagon coal trains and other goods trains of 1,600 tons and more along the main line, these powerful and decidedly modern engines were never fully utilized. After the economic crisis of 1929, the demand for hundred-wagon trains disappeared and Gresley’s three-cylinder 02 class 2-8-0s were able to handle the heaviest trains with aplomb. In any case, hundred-wagon trains were too long for the LNER’s existing main line freight loops and this problem was only partly solved when stretches of the east coast main line were upgraded to four tracks in the 1930s.

  The P1s were originally to have been even larger – 2-10-2s – but this really was a case of Gresley and Bulleid getting too far ahead of themselves. As it was, the P1s were fitted with A1 boilers, with extra power provided by an auxiliary booster engine on the trailing axles. Made by the Superheat Co. of New York, they offered a hefty increase in tractive effort when called upon to start very heavy trains up gradients or when they needed to accelerate quickly. With the booster kicked in, the starting tractive effort of the P1s was a considerable 47,000 lb. To make life more comfortable for the driver, the locomotives were fitted with steam-powered reversing gear – a feature of Bulleid’s Southern Railway Pacifics of the 1940s – while steam brakes fitted to the wheels of their tenders as well as to the engines themselves gave the crews an extra degree of reassurance when stopping hundred-wagon loads, which had no continuous brakes, especially downhill and on rails slippery with rain. With their 5 ft 2 in driving wheels – larger than most British goods locomotives – the P1s had a good turn of speed, with 65 mph attained on a test with a passenger train.

  Edward Thompson, Gresley’s successor, had the P1s scrapped in 1945, on the grounds that they did not fit into the LNER’s fleet of standard locomotives. The P1s had shown the potential for what a fast and heavy railway freight service could be as early as the mid-1920s – and just such a service became a daily feature of American railroads from 1925, soon after Woodard’s A-1 2-8-4 emerged from Lima’s Ohio works. Britain, however, would have to wait until the arrival of the British Railways Standard class 9F 2-10-0s in 1954 – engines that, if required, could run a twelve-car passenger train at up to 90 mph – before it had a truly fast heavy freight locomotive. Even so, what most held back the speed of goods trains in Britain was the fact the vast majority of them had no continuous braking system and were limited to just 25 mph so that they could be stopped safely within signal distances.

  A year before his masterpiece, the streamlined A4 Pacific, emerged from Doncaster in 1935, Gresley and Bulleid came up with another hugely impressive 2-8-2 design. This was the P2 class, an express passenger locomotive with 6 ft 2 in driving wheels, smaller than normally used on such engines, designed for hauling 550 ton sleeping-car expresses over heavy gradients from Edinburgh across the Forth Bridge and through to Dundee and Aberdeen. Six of these formidable three-cylinder locomotives were built, and the first two, 2001 Cock o’ the North and 2002 Earl Marischal, were among the most beguiling of all British steam locomotives.

  Cock o’ the North was a stunning-looking machine. She was very long, her lines clean as could be. Her smoke deflectors – necessary to lift the exhaust of a large-boilered locomotive with a short chimney clear of the cab and the crew’s view ahead – were a forward-projecting continuation of the boiler casing, rather than being bolted on. Her eight close-coupled driving wheels were wholly exposed, giving the engine a distinctly modern appearance. Until then, and even afterwards, it was the tradition of British engineers to cover a part of the wheels of express engines with splashers on the running boards, as if there was something a little indecent about them being exposed to full view. A V-shaped cab derived from the Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean railway in France, an American chime whistle (the first to be fitted to an LNER engine, it had been a present to Gresley from Captain Jack Howey when Gresley had visited the miniature Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway in Kent when it was taking delivery of its latest, US-style Pacifics, Dr Syn and Black Prince), double Kylchap exhausts, an ACFI feedwater heater in place of injectors, a massive 50 sq ft grate, a high degree of superheating, and Lentz rotary-cam poppet valves instead of the Walschaerts valve gear that Gresley normally employed – all added up to a powerful and efficient locomotive, and one that clearly embodied ideas Gresley had seen in designs by Chapelon and was keen to evaluate.

  Gresley and Bulleid had first met Chapelon in 1928 at Davey Paxman & Co., the Colchester-based engineering firm that built Captain Howey’s 15 in gauge Pacifics for the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway. Designed by Henry Greenly, these were based closely on the LNER A1s. Davey, Paxman & Co. was then the West European agent for the Lentz oscillating- and rotary-cam poppet valve gear which the LNER engineers were about to fit to Gresley’s D49/2 class three-cylinder 4-4-0s, a variant of the D49 intermediate express passenger locomotive built between 1927 and 1935. Chapelon was at Colchester with the Paris–Orléans railway’s chief design engineer, Paul Billet, to discuss the Lentz oscillating-cam poppet valve gear for what was to be the epoch-making rebuilt Pacific No. 3566. As Gresley and Bulleid both spoke French (between 1908 and his rejoining the GNR in 1912, Bulleid had been employed as assistant manager at the Westinghouse works at Freinville, near Paris) and were keen to improve the performance of their locomotives, they struck up a great friendship with the man who would become the world’s greatest steam locomotive engineer, even though he was virtually unknown at the time.

  For his part, Chapelon was impressed with Gresley’s willingness to experiment. The results, though, could be idiosyncratic and even downright disappointing. When, in November 1934, at the suggestion of Chapelon, Bulleid took Cock o’ the North to the French locomotive testing plant at Vitry-sur-Seine, the P2’s performance was much inferior to that of Chapelon’s compound Pacifics of much the same weight, let alone that of his herculean 4-8-0s. Out on the 90 mile line between Orléans and Tours, with a train composed of four P-0 class 4-6-0 brake locomotives, Cock o’ the North exerted a maximum sustained power output of 1,910 dbhp at 68 mph.

  Chapelon himself was the most persuasive and convincing exponent of the compoun
d steam locomotive, in which steam is expanded not once, as in the conventional or ‘simple’ Stephensonian engine, but twice (or even three times, as in marine engines) and therefore performs greater work for the same amount of steam raised and fuel expended. He believed that only compounding would yield the super power results sought by his English friends. In Cock o’ the North, though, the excessively large clearance volume (or dead space) in the valve and cylinder steam passages more than offset the improved freedom of steam flow, and resulted in a specific steam consumption of 30 per cent more than in the Chapelon Pacifics. This, as much a lack of compounding, ensured that the 2-8-2 had a proportionately lower output than the French Pacifics.

  Even so, with their tractive effort of 43,462 lb – the highest yet for a British passenger locomotive – and eight-wheel drive, the P2s performed very well indeed on the Edinburgh to Aberdeen day and overnight expresses. Cock o’ the North’s debut in June 1934 was a test run from King’s Cross at the head of a twenty-coach, 650 ton train. With this, she ran freely at 85 mph and topped the ascent of the long Stoke Bank, between Peterborough and Grantham, at 57.5 mph, generating 2,100 dbhp. Despite their power and sure-footedness, the P2s did give problems in their earliest days, but they got into their stride and did splendid work on the difficult Edinburgh to Aberdeen line. They were much loved by drivers, if not by firemen, who had to shovel coal into their huge grates at a much greater rate than was necessary with the A1 and A3 Pacifics. In due course, they were rebuilt as rather ineffectual Pacifics by Edward Thompson, in 1943–4, and became the first LNER 4-6-2s to be withdrawn from service by British Railways.

  As it was, the breakthrough Gresley and Bulleid were looking for came in 1935, and triumphantly so. Gresley had gone to Germany in 1933 to ride on the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s sensational new Fliegender Hamburger (Flying Hamburger), a two-car, streamlined, diesel-electric train which ran the 178 lightly inclined miles from Berlin to Hamburg in 138 minutes at an average of 77.4 mph. The performance was undoubtedly impressive, demanding long stretches to be run at 100 mph, yet Gresley had a hunch that he could do just as well with steam in Britain. He was certainly interested to learn that the back-up train used when the diesel flyer failed had made the run, using a standard light 03 Pacific limited to 87 mph, with three standard coaches, in a scheduled 148 minutes, although this timing was capable of improvement if the maximum speed limit were raised.

  Gresley was, though, very unimpressed with the spartan accommodation offered by the Fliegender Hamburger. There were just ninety-eight seats when the train first ran in May 1933, four months after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, and complaints that the seats were too cramped led to a reduction to seventy-seven. There was, of course, no dining car, although German businessmen were perfectly used to eating cold sausages, cheese, and rolls, washed down with wine or beer, when travelling. Not so their British counterparts, who were accustomed to much finer and more ample fare. When the LNER’s first streamlined express, the Silver Jubilee, began service in September 1935, it offered passengers in first and third class (there was no second at the time), a choice of forty-six cocktails, including a Silver Jubilee at two shillings. The à la carte menu proffered choices of soup followed by a fish course (oysters were on offer, too), a Jubilee mixed grill, a pudding (peach melba, anyone?), and cheese and biscuits.

  To provide such a service and adequate comfortable seating, Gresley needed a seven-coach train and a new class of locomotive that could race it the 268 miles from King’s Cross to Newcastle in four hours flat, with a stop at Darlington. Before the dramatic unveiling and breathtaking press run of the Silver Jubilee, research into high-speed running on the east coast main line was conducted with great haste. In 1934, Gresley asked the German manufacturers of the two-car Fliegender Hamburger – Waggon- und Maschinenbau AG (WUMAG) – how long a 140 seat, three-car train would take to run the 185.7 miles from King’s Cross to Leeds, a route that attracted heavy business traffic on a daily basis. The meticulously calculated answer was 165 minutes, including a contingency allowance for checks. The more ambitious run over the 268 miles to Newcastle would take 255 minutes.

  On 30 November 1934, 4472 Flying Scotsman steamed out from King’s Cross at the head of a four-coach test train, complete with dining car, weighing 147 tons. It was a dull and misty morning. On the footplate were driver Sparshatt and fireman Webster. Cecil J. Allen was sitting by a window in one of the coaches timing the special using the lineside mileposts and a pair of stopwatches. Nothing like this had been experienced in Britain before. Flying Scotsman was through Peterborough, 76.35 miles from London, in 39 seconds over the hour. She topped the final 1-in-178 gradient of the long climb to Stoke summit at 81 mph (a new record) and was into Leeds Central in 151 minutes and 16 seconds, fourteen minutes ahead of the schedule calculated for the streamlined German diesel. With two extra carriages attached, and with the train now weighing 207 tons, Flying Scotsman ran back to London in just over 157 minutes, racing down Stoke Bank to Peterborough at a maximum speed of exactly 100 mph. This was the first time a British steam locomotive had, for certain, run at a three-figure speed. Cecil J. Allen rushed to Broadcasting House to report the record run on the BBC’s 9 o’clock news.

  The German schedule had been easily beaten by a conventional train, with 140 seats, hot meals, and an eleven-year-old steam locomotive at the front without the benefits of a higher-pressure A3 boiler, a high degree of superheating, or streamlining. On 5 March 1935, a second high-speed test trip was made, this time from King’s Cross to Newcastle and back, formed of six coaches weighing 217 tons, pulled by the A3 Pacific 2750 Papyrus. The train was taken down to Newcastle by driver Gutteridge and fireman Wightman, and up to London by Sparshatt and Webster. With Cecil J. Allen on the stopwatches again, the special took just 237 minutes and 7 seconds for the 268.35 mile journey, arriving three minutes ahead of time and undercutting the proposed German diesel timing by eighteen minutes. Without a signal stop and other delays, the run would have been made in 230 minutes.

  On the return journey, Sparshatt flew down Stoke Bank, averaging 100.2 mph for 12.25 miles on end and reaching a maximum of 108 mph. Papyrus arrived at King’s Cross in 231 minutes and 48 seconds. As Allen reported, a total of three hundred miles had been run at an average speed of 80 mph, and coal consumption, at 43 lb per mile, showed that, although running like the wind, Papyrus – named after the winner of the 1923 Derby – had been expertly handled and economically fired.

  Anything diesel could do, steam could do better. Or so it seemed on the LNER at the time. The drive to high speed certainly galvanized Gresley’s drawing office and the Doncaster works. Within a week of Papyrus’s record run, an ‘outline diagram of suggested train’ had been submitted to the LNER board. As soon as they were approved, drawings of the locomotive, to be designated class A4, and train – the Silver Jubilee coaches designed by Norman Newsome, chief technical assistant, carriage and wagon – were ordered. The frames of 2509 Silver Link were laid down at Doncaster on 26 June and the engine steamed for the first time on 7 September. The silver-grey streamlined train was ready on 17 September. The press run was scheduled for Friday, 27 September, and the daily service was due to start the following Monday.

  Not only was every target met, and in such an extraordinarily short time, but Silver Link was truly raring to go. The press run made international news. Before it left King’s Cross, Ralph Wedgwood, general manager of the LNER insisted: ‘This is not a stunt train’ – even though it must have felt like one at the time. Cecil J. Allen was on board to time the train, sitting at one point alongside an ebullient Gresley, a deeply concerned Charles Brown, the line’s civil engineer, and the Daily Mail’s reporter, Randolph Churchill. Up front, seated on leather-upholstered bucket seats on the footplate of the wedge-shaped locomotive, its motion enclosed, were driver Taylor and fireman Luty – not that Luty would be sitting for long.

  At 14.25, Silver Link stormed out of the station. Just beyond Stevenage she was
up to 100 mph, 112.5 mph six miles north of Hitchin and again at Sandy, averaging 100 mph for 43 miles on end. She was then through Peterborough, travelling 76.4 miles in 55 minutes and 2 seconds. Earlier, from Hatfield to Huntingdon, a distance of 41.15 miles, the train had averaged 100.5 mph. Between mileposts 30 and 55, where speed, as Allen recorded, had never fallen below 100 mph until reduced to 85 mph for a restricted curve, the average speed had been 107.5 mph. Both the Silver Jubilee and Silver Link were media darlings and wonders of the new age of streamlining. These eye-opening speeds had been achieved without the benefit of modern colour-light signalling, fully canted curves (where one rail is elevated above the other to ease trains smoothly around the curve at high speeds), or special training for the crew. Indeed, as 2509 was riding so smoothly, it seems possible that driver Taylor was unaware of quite how fast he was going until Gresley came through the corridor tender to tell him: ‘Ease your arm, young man; there are some rather nervous elderly gentlemen in the train.’ French Flaman recording speedometers were subsequently fitted to the A4s. How crews worked a train like the Silver Jubilee so successfully through bitter English winters, at high speed through dense fogs, driving snow, and pelting rain, remains not so much a mystery as something of a miracle. Small wonder these drivers were popular working-class heroes.

  The train itself needed fine tuning – the suspension of the coaches was slightly modified after the boisterous test run, while the civil engineer increased the rail cant on the curves – but the A4 proved to be a brilliant design from the word go. Until a second member of the class was ready, Silver Link ran the up and down Silver Jubilee service by herself every day, Monday to Friday, for the first three weeks, covering eight thousand miles. This was proof that the first of a new generation of steam locomotives had arrived – a machine that was fast, powerful, and reliable, and which could be turned around quickly with precious little servicing.