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Turbomotive souvenir
This small item was very kindly given to me recently by Terry Burnett, a former employee of GEC Alstom (Metropolitan Vickers). A former colleague of his, a turbine design engineer, on his retirement from the company, passed to Terry a tobacco tin containing a few small turbine blades. These were original spares for the ‘Turbomotive’, Stanier ‘Pacific’ No. 6202. The Engineer had been given them originally by H.L.Guy (Sir Henry), who designed the actual Turbine. The blade in the photograph, approximately 50mm long, depicts the original ‘bulb root’ fixing and has been suitably plinth-mountedby Terry on my behalf.
Those few surviving blades are all that apparently remains of this historic locomotive.
In 1930, the ‘Turbomotive’ was the first successful steam-turbine driven locomotive built by Stanier to use the novel Metropolitan Vickers steam turbine
