THE ‘ROYAL SCOTS’ BRITAIN’S GREATEST MAIN LINE STEAM LOCOMOTIVES
The year 1948 was only eight days old when a memorandum was circulated among the six Regions of the new British Railways. Entitled ‘Interchange of locomotives between regions’, the document advised that the Chairman (Robert Riddles) of the British Railways Mechanical Engineering Committee had decreed that it was “desirable to obtain a preliminary comparison of the performance of the different standard locomotives in service’. The term ‘Standard’ was employed loosely here, referring to the classifications used by the former pre-nationalisation companies and should not be confused, by the modern reader, with the BR steam designs introduced after 1951 and which owed something – although, arguably not a lot – to the results of the 1948 Trials.
Incidentally, the Mechanical Engineering Committee, one of eighteen in the Railway Executive, comprised an impressive list of names renowned from Britain’s railways in the days of steam. Chairman Robert Riddles presided over Oliver Bulleid from the former Southern Railway, the Great Western Railway’s F. W. Hawksworth, A. H. Peppercorn from the London & North Eastern Railway and H. G. Ivatt from the London Midland & Scottish Railway. R. C. Bond and E. S. Cox completed the dramatis personae of this august collection of engineering luminaries.
When the Regional structure of the soonto-be nationalised railway network had been announced in the previous November by Sir Cyril (later, Lord) Hurcomb, Chairman of the British Transport Commission, The Times newspaper had expressed considerable concern about possible conflict between and among the technical staffs of the overall BTC and those of the Regions. In practice, this does not seem to have been a major problem, although the motive power trials which took place later that year did not fully conform to even the preliminary outline which had been circulated on 8th January. Additionally, it soon appeared that the BTC’s locomotive engineers would in any event ignore the results of the tests which they themselves had requested.
For the Exchange Trials, locomotives already in service, and mostly pre-war, were temporarily reallocated among the Regions for ‘road testing’ in that first summer of nationalisation, both on their own routes and on others for which they had not been designed (and where some clearance tests had first to be conducted). Riddles, formerly of the LMS and the Ministry of Supply, was in overall charge of what became known as the ‘Locomotive Exchanges’ – hardly an appropriate term for the comparative testing of a unitary body’s equipment – with, bizarrely, RE Deputy Chairman Sir William Slim being asked to handle publicity. (He had previously commanded Britain’s 14th Army in the Far East and his next appointment was to be Chief of the Imperial General Staff.)
Comparative testing was undertaken in three types of haulage categories – express passenger (five classes), mixed traffic (four classes, described as ‘General Purpose’) and heavy goods (five classes). Locomotives were drawn from four of the six Regions, the exceptions being North Eastern and Scottish, although the latter did provide one of the test tracks, namely the Highland main line.
In the first of these categories were the following:
Class of streamlined engines introduced in 1935,
