THE launch of The Railway Magazine in 1897 came almost at the halfway point of Britain’s 143-year steam age, which began with the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway on September 27, 1825 and ended with British Railways’ ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’ on August 11, 1968. The magazine could not have been launched at a better time, for 72 years of frenzied development had transformed life for everyone and, with the 20th century just around the corner, the pinnacle was yet to come.
1897 also marked the formation of the last of the great pre-Grouping railway companies when the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway changed its name to the Great Central Railway in anticipation of its London Extension that would be completed in 1899 (see also pages 36-41).
Express passenger locomotives were knocking on the door of 90mph. One of Francis, had already been timed at 88mph. Then in 1895 – only two years before the launch of this magazine – another member of the class No. 790, now preserved at the National Railway Museum in York, averaged 67mph over the 141 miles from Crewe to Carlisle during a leg of the fabled ‘Races to the North’ between London and Aberdeen, in which the competing East and West Coast routes pulled out all the stops in their bids to get there first.
