IF you had the chance to select the locomotive and train for a final steam-hauled trip from King’s Cross before the arrival of the ‘dreaded diesels’ (as many would have said at the time), what would you have chosen? Might it have been the combination that randomly befell Newcastle-based train timer Alan Middlemiss one afternoon in July 1959?
As he walked down the platform alongside the crack ‘Talisman’ express, Alan was unaware this would be his last Gresley Pacific run from the capital, but he had quickly come to relish his journeys home on this new service. Introduced in 1956, and named after one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, the London to Edinburgh ‘Talisman’ was booked to run nonstop from King’s Cross to
