Each a glimpse then (almost) gone for ever: THE MIGHTY PEPPERCORN A1 PACIFICS

Pete Kelly retells the story of the LNER’s majestic but short-lived 49 Peppercorn A1 Pacific locomotives and the construction of the 50th, No. 60163 Tornado, 42 years after the last of the originals had vanished forever.

UNDER the auspices of the newly-formed British Railways in 1948 and 1949, construction of the original class of LNER-designed A1 Pacifics was divided between the former Great Northern Railway’s Doncaster Works (26) and the former North Eastern Railway’s Darlington Works (23).

The locomotives were a development of LNER Chief Mechanical Engineer Edward Thompson’s one and only A1/1, a drastic 1945 rebuild of Sir Nigel Gresley’s original A1 Pacific No. 4470 Great Northern featuring three separate sets of Walschaerts valve-gear in favour of Gresley’s preference for just two outside sets of Walschaerts working the valve motion for the middle cylinder, a matter over which, before Gresley’s sudden death in 1941, the two had been bitterly divided.

For the record, it is often forgotten that the derived motion that brought about the revered ‘Gresley beat’ was in fact a joint effort between Gresley and Harold Holcroft.

Even though Edward Thompson had only five years to go until retirement, on account of his seniority it was he rather than the more affable Arthur H Peppercorn who succeeded Gresley as chief mechanical engineer. In the midst of the Second World War, with the almost impossible demands it placed on Britain’s railways, Thompson’s first priority was to introduce the B1 4-6-0, a capable two-cylinder mixed-traffic locomotive requiring the minimum of maintenance, of which 409 were eventually built.

Origin

Peppercorn’s chance finally