IT could not happen now. Take a famous loco from a railway museum, transfer it to a workshop, fettle it up for East Coast Main Line passenger work and move it to London without everyone having heard about it. At the same time, restore seven 50-year-old coaches and reunite loco and stock in London for a surprise appearance. Only a chosen few were entrusted the knowledge of the clandestine moves being choreographed by the London & North Eastern Railway’s public relations department for execution on June 30, 1938.
The audacious plan to place Stirling ‘8ft’ 4-2-2 ‘Single’ in King’s Cross station alongside the luxurious new ‘Flying Scotsman’ coaches headed by ‘A4’ Pacific No. 4498 Sir Nigel Gresley had eventually gained the approval of great designer Gresley himself. Even railway enthusiasts such as Kenneth Leech, the Westinghouse chief draughtsman in the brake department, were startled to see the elegant Single adjacent to their offices. Indeed, had the vulgar term ‘gobsmacked’ existed in those days, he might just have been so.
Railway writer extraordinaire and signalling engineer O S Nock, who had been party to the secrecy, was on hand and compelled to confide the programme as word spread quickly round the office.
The arrangement was for the 170 invited guests to join the vintage train as far as Stevenage, where they would transfer to the luxurious new ‘Flying Scotsman’ train. The significance of the date will not be lost on The RM’s readership – 1938 marked 50 years since the 1888 Race to the North featured Stirling Singles out of ‘The Cross’, while June 30 was just three days before Mallard achieved its world speed record.
‘A diverting event’ was how The RM referred to the appearance of Stirling’s No.1 4-2-2 alongside the streamlined ‘A4’, but the following Sunday’s fling down Stoke Bank at 125mph was to prove an even greater distraction.
I will pause there for a minute while the great debate about 125mph or 126mph maximum turns another full circle – (basically, the interpretation of the dynamometer car’s results to show 126mph were over too short a distance for even Gresley to accept) – but I could not print 126mph
