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Brief encounter with
the king of steam
I have been in love with steam trains for as long as I can remember. I have railways in my blood. I come from a railway town, my uncle and grandfather were employed at the now-defunct carriage works in my old home town of York. I was brought up in a house beside the York to Scarborough line and spent many a happy hour of my childhood waving to the train drivers. I also have vivid childhood memories of visiting the small museum that closed to make way for the National Railway Museum in York. In those days, you could climb into the locomotive cabs and touch all those polished brass dials and levers. (And a note to all those men who always tell me that my obsession with trains is a phallic thing: do they honestly think their rather unattractive genitals bear any relation to a 102-ton steel locomotive? I think not.) My greatest wish has always been to ride on the footplate of a Class A-4 Pacific locomotive, the most magnificent thing ever to come out of an engineering shed. The A-4 Pacific was Britain's very own streamliner, an art-deco 'racehorse' introduced in 1935, just in time for George V's silver jubilee. The A-4s were designed by Sir Nigel Gresley - probably the greatest locomotive engineer the world has ever seen. In the Thirties, the goal of steam was speed and a Doncaster-built A-4 called the Mallard provided it by hurtling through the Lincolnshire countryside at 126mph to became the fastest steam locomotive in the world. At the time, it must have seemed as though this was only the latest achievement in a race that would go on forever - that better, faster engines would come along and overtake the Mallard's achievement. History, however, knows better and the Mallard now holds the record for steam 'for all time', a poignant phrase on a par with 'the line ended in daughters'. Falcon, Wild Swan, Kingfisher, Merlin, Silver Fox, Golden Fleece, Sparrow Hawk - once there were 35 A-4s. One was destroyed in a Second World War air raid on York and the rest were decommissioned in the Sixties, that reign of terror for the steam train. Now there are only six A-4s left, four of which are in Britain. The grande dame herself, the Mallard, takes pride of place in the National Railway Museum. A chance remark during a newspaper interview resulted in a call from the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, the preservation society now running what was once the Whitby to Pickering line, offering a trip on the Sir Nigel Gresley, the engine named for the great man himself. The line, planned under the supervision of George Stephenson of Rocket fame and opened in 1836, using trains drawn by horses, is one of the oldest in the country. It was closed by British Rail as part of the Beeching cuts in the Sixties. We set off early from Edinburgh and drive without stopping for breakfast so that when we arrive on the station platform at Grosmont, the sight of the tea-room (with a real coal fire) provides a brief but welcome encounter with coffee and buttered scones. Grosmont appears completely authentic, a station preserved in time but, like most of the other features on the line, a considerable portion of it has been cobbled together from the leftovers of abandoned stations - a booking office here, a lamppost there. And here she is, the Sir Nigel herself (even locos with male names are female), number 60007, painted in the old BR blue livery and almost pawing at the ground as she works up a head of steam. So it's on with the overalls and on to the footplate with George, the driver, Peter the fireman and Roger, who is the custodian of the engine for the Sir Nigel Gresley Locomotive Preservation Trust. We are a full complement - the maximum number of crew allowed on the footplate is four. Peter gallantly offers me the fireman's seat, although as the journey progresses it becomes difficult to see when a fireman ever gets to sit down. The job is a lot more than just shovelling coal. For one thing, he has to keep an eye on all those dials so that the boiler doesn't either lose pressure or 'blow-off', that is, build up too much steam, although every time anyone says this I think they're saying 'blow-up'. A little nerve-racking, especially as, when we do let off steam, there is an ear-shattering noise in the cab. In bright spring sunshine, we set off across the North York Moors which are eerily deserted, having been closed by the spectre of foot-and-mouth disease. We won't be breaking any records today, for although the Sir Nigel holds the postwar record for speed (112mph), restrictions on private railway lines dictate a paltry 25mph. Everything is somehow as I imagined it: the signalman requesting a shovelful of coal for his fire, the hosing down of the footplate (George runs a clean cab), the exchanging of tokens at every station. I am in a state of bliss, especially as I get to blow the whistle all the way there and back. Grosmont, Goathland, Newton Dale Halt, Levisham, Pickering - the 18-mile journey takes us past beautiful scenery and bizarre sights, such as the early-warning station at Fylingdales, where the Prisoner-like golf ball shapes have been replaced by an equally surreal receiver that looks like a giant wedge of cheese. The line also boasts one of the steepest gradients in the country - 1 in 49. Even if you've never been to the North York Moors you will almost certainly have seen this railway and the trains that run on it, in The Secret Garden, Brideshead Revisited and countless other films and television productions. Goathland is the Aidensfield of Heartbeat and Grosmont stars as Hogwarts Station in the new Harry Potter movie. On the train is a small American boy following the 'Harry Potter trail'. George, our driver, jokes that he's expecting his Equity card any day now. - Kate Atkinson, The Guardian, 28 April 2001 |
