Mallard

Anniversaries fascinate me. Every day is the anniversary of something and a little investigation will reveal reminders of important events about which we have almost forgotten. Since I have been writing about anniversaries, I will write about just one more. In a week when England were knocked out of the World Cup - as they deserved to be by possibly the eventual winner - and the cricket team lost to Australia [twice] and Andy Murray carried on the tradition of male tennis players failing to win at Wimbledon, I will recall a time when England could still do some things well. It was a time of great economic uncertainty, unemployment was high and the threat of war hung over Europe but at 4.22 pm on Sunday 3rd July 1938 a beautiful blue painted steam locomotive, with black smoke box and bright red wheels, with seven coaches surged along the East Coast main line just south of Grantham and established a world speed record for a steam locomotive at 126 mph - a figure that has never been exceeded and now probably never will be. Sir Herbert Nigel Gresley's masterpiece A4 pacific Mallard performed to perfection and astounded the world. Sir Nigel was too ill to be on the train on the day but he was given a massive tonic by the success of Driver Joe Duddington and his hard working fireman, Tommy Bray.

The A4 class of streamlined locomotives epitomised the best of steam locomotive designs and incorporated ideas pioneered by Italian car designer Ettore Bugatti and French railway engineer Andre Chapelon. The engines were immensely powerful, with four cylinders and a high working boiler pressure and were designed for high speed running between London and Newcastle and Edinburgh. Gresley had been assisted for many years by Oliver Bulleid, the New Zealand born engineer full of highly innovative ideas but by this time Bulleid had left the LNER and was now Chief Mechanical Engineer on the Southern Railway. These A4 pacifics were one of the most successful of all steam locomotives that ever operated in Britain and it is fitting that so many of them have been preserved - including Mallard, which still in running order, is owned by the National Railway Museum.

/