# British Railways

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lecture notes; filmstrip, 51 frames. The copyright of the lecture is the property of the British Transport Commission. Frames 16 and 24 are reproduced by courtesy of Aerofilms Ltd. Source:
LECTURE NOTES for the FILM STRIP
British Railways
BRITISH TRANSPORT FILMS
* NOTE FOR THE LECTURER
* This lecture can be read out as it stands, and it is important that the frames of the film strip which illustrates it should be changed at the right moments in the lecture. The lecturer is therefore advised to view the strip in conjunction with the text before giving the lecture.
* The copyright of the lecture is the property of the British Transport Commission. Frames 16 and 24 are reproduced by courtesy of Aerofilms Ltd.
* It’s always a good thing, when you’re talking about railways, to start off with maps, and that’s why I’m asking you first of all to have a look at these two railway maps of Britain. The one on the right shows the important railway lines, and the one on the left shows the six regions into which British Railways have been divided – the Eastern, London Midland, North Eastern, Scottish, Southern and Western Regions. The right-hand map shows how densely covered with railways this island is, particularly England. Just look at the railways round London, and round Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. See how thick they are in the industrial areas of South Wales and Lancashire; and see, too, how many lines connect London with the North of England.
* But the railways haven’t always been a unified whole as they are now. Most of you will remember the four companies which existed before the railways were nationalised – the London Midland and Scottish, the London and North Eastern, the Great Western and the Southern Railways. The Great Western was set up in 1922, and the other three in 1923. Thus more than 120 smaller independent companies which had grown up during the preceding years were amalgamated. The names of some of these, too, may be familiar to you – the Midland, for instance, which ran from St. Pancras, London, through Yorkshire to Carlisle; the London and North Western, and the London and South Western. And yet, all the time, the tendency has been towards a unified transport system for Britain, simply because that’s the way the railways function most efficiently. Today, as I have said, all this complicated railway system is unified, and operated in six regions. And now, having dealt with place, let’s deal with time...
* In this diagram you’ve got the three stages in what might be called the constitutional history of British Railways – separation, amalgamation and unification.
* Over on the left is the stage of separation, in which Britain was covered with all sorts of independent railway companies, some small, some great. In 1923 these railways were amalgamated into the L.M.S., L.N.E.R., G.W.R., and Southern. And, in turn, the locomotives which represent the big four companies are shown going to nationalisation junction 1948, there to turn into the British Railways crest which symbolises the unity of railway transport throughout Britain.
* But that’s only one side of railway history. There’s another side too – the history of how locomotives first began to run on rails, and how trains developed. The railways were a purely British achievement. In 1802, an engineer named Richard Trevithick designed a steam locomotive which ran round a circular track in Euston Square, London, and in 1814 George Stephenson built his first locomotive...
* So this locomotive which you see here which bears the date 1813 is obviously of a very early type indeed, although the picture of it must have been taken many years after 1813. But whatever the circumstances in which it was taken, this photograph does show you what our early steam locomotives were like.
* As a matter of fact, colliery locomotives like this were in use many years before the first passengers travelled by rail. Indeed, it was not until 1825 that the world’s first passenger railway opened in the North of England, between Stockton and Darlington.
* Things have moved fast since locomotives like this were in use.
* Yet the one you see here drawing the Royal Scot past the water troughs at Bushey, near London, is the logical development of that old colliery locomotive.
* You probably know that trains can pick up water while travelling, from troughs such as these, to avoid delay. But in many cases the water has to be specially softened, for hard water such as you get out of the tap in some districts would fur up the boiler like the inside of a kettle, and quickly make it useless. In some districts, however, the mains water is soft enough to be fed directly to the troughs.
* Now here’s another new train, but of an entirely different kind. The Royal Scot travels 400 miles from London to Glasgow. This electric train travels between Liverpool Street and Shenfield, about twenty miles north east of London on the railway to Chelmsford and Colchester. Liverpool Street is one of the busiest passen-ger stations in Britain, and until this new electric service was opened in September 1949, by the Minister of Trans-port, the passengers were all carried in steam trains.
* You’ll notice that this train, which is just entering Shenfield Station, takes its power from overhead cables through an apparatus on the roof, which is known as a pantograph. The train is made up of nine coaches, and there’s a pantograph and electric motor in the front of every three coaches.
* But perhaps you are more familiar with electric trains which pick up their power from a third rail...
* ... That’s the system used here in the Southern Region of British Railways. This is the London to Newhaven boat train – the first boat train ever to be hauled by an electric locomotive in Britain. It’s an interesting locomotive. In order to maintain its pulling power over gaps in the conductor rail, it is fed by two generators which are kept going by a one-ton flywheel, which rotates throughout the journey. Even if the locomotive is brought to rest in the middle of a gap in the electric conductor rails, the flywheel has enough momentum to keep the generators running and so move the heaviest train out of the longest gap in the electrified system.
* But I’m sure most of you already know quite a good deal about passenger trains. And yet carrying passengers is less than half the story. On the railways about 60 per cent of the revenue comes from carrying freight, parcels, newspapers and mails – and far the greater part of this 60 per cent comes from freight...
* This engine is a special type known as a ‘Garratt’, and it can haul a train of anything up to a hundred wagons filled with coal. This particular loco-motive is two engines in one. It has four cylinders fed with steam from the boiler in the middle, which is in turn fed with water from the tanks at front and rear. Such engines, which are the most powerful we have, are used for mineral traffic – coal and iron ore. Coal class traffic – of which we carried nearly a hundred and sixty-five million tons in 1949 – is obviously of vital importance to the country.
* As a contrast to this heavy traffic, a sight familiar to anyone who has travelled by rail is an electric platform trolley, used for the hand-ling of light traffic for passenger and parcels trains. It is shown here on the station platform at Scarborough. Behind the driver there’s a chair, a bicycle, a mail bag, milk cans, parcels and packages of all descriptions. Such is the variety of stuff which the railways are called on to carry.
* And yet they carry stranger things than these …
* Sometimes they move whole farms from one part of the country to another and horses, cows and sheep are frequently railway travellers. There’s a big trade in livestock with Ireland, for instance, and the railways have special accommoda-tion for livestock at Heysham, Holyhead and Fishguard. For horses there are special carriages, and in this picture we see a pony and a foal being put in a British Railways horse-box.
* Livestock carried by the railways was just under a million tons in 1949, and it’s important enough to form one of the four main categories into which all freight is divided – merchandise, coal and coke, minerals, and livestock.
* Now I wonder how many of you would guess right if I asked you what the next picture represents...
* It’s the start of a pigeon race! You might not think that there was much connection between homing pigeons and the railways, yet here you can see British Railways releasing about fifteen thousand pigeons from Newcastle at Welwyn Garden City Station.
* You probably know that pigeon fanciers hold races to see whose bird can get home first. And this is where the railways come in, for all the pigeons you see here came from the north in ten railway vans. On occasions like this the baskets are piled up by the side of the train, and then at a given moment the doors are slipped open and the pigeons fly out on their 250-mile journey home. That should give you some idea of the great variety of loads the railways carry.
* Now all these various kinds of traffic, which totalled over 280 million tons in 1949, have to be dealt with in different ways. Let us look for a moment at the way British Railways deal with general merchandise.
* In this depot, the rail-head at Lawley Street, Birmingham, the mechanical handling of small consignments is the most up to date in the world. On the left, a row of drays is backed up to the moving belt on which the man is standing. On the right are one. or two loaded trolleys, and in the background are the railway wagons. This shed deals with two kinds of traffic – what’s called town traffic, which is loaded on to drays for delivery in Birmingham and district, and transship traffic, which is loaded in rail wagons for further destinations.
* Not all depots need to be so highly mechanised as this …
* Here, for instance, is Swindon, one of a number of what we call railhead distribution centres. Such centres have been established all over the country, and to this one traffic from a wide area of the West of England is con-signed. The train comes in at the right, is unloaded on to the platform, and the merchandise is separated on the platform according to its destinations. The same process, of course, takes place in reverse at the same time – goods coming in by road and being loaded into wagons.
* In this next picture we can see the process taken a stage further. The road van, which is owned and operated by the railways, has now got its load almost complete. On the left you can see the checker with the list of goods, which will later be handed over to the driver when he takes the lorry away.
* And here we have the last link in the chain, the delivery of goods to a farm in Wiltshire by the British Railways country lorry services, which deliver their loads actually into the farm yard. It’s not the same van that you saw in the last picture, but the sacks which formed its load have very likely passed through the same railway depot: And if they came fr6m Birmingham they may even have passed through the Lawley Street depot before they were put on the train for Swindon and final delivery here.
* For many years the railways depended on horse-drawn road cartage services.
* This picture of the van driver saying goodbye to his horse as he drives off at the wheel of a new articulated dray symbolises the change-over which is now taking place. There are still 5,000 horses at work for British Railways, but they are generally being replaced by motor vehicles and their stables will know them no more. British Railways have over twelve thousand motor vehicles, and the number is constantly increasing.
* We have now seen something of how parcels and goods are dealt with on the railways. Now let me tell you some-thing about the wagons which carry not only that mer-chandise, but coal, coke, iron ore, and machinery. First of all, how are they directed from one place to another?
* Here is the answer. This is an aerial picture of one of Britain’s marshalling yards, where trains of wagons destined for different parts of the country are broken up, re-formed, and sent on their journey again as new trains. The wagons are shunted in slowly at one end, uncoupled, and redistributed throughout the fan of sidings. Each of these tracks takes wagons destined for a certain area – London, Liverpool, Scotland, wherever it may be – and incoming wagons are directed on to these tracks according to their destination. Most goods trains run to a timetable just like passenger trains, of course – so when it gets near time for a train to leave for London, there are all its wagons standing on one track ready to be coupled up into a train.
* This yard, by the way, is at Crewe
* This picture, taken at one end of the marshalling yard at Whitemoor, in Cambridgeshire (the largest sorting sidings in Europe), shows the process in greater detail. The wagons come into the yard from this end. They’re then uncoupled and pushed over the brow of a hill known as 'the hump’ by a shunting engine, so that one wagon after another detaches itself from the rest and runs down-hill. All the sidings behind the control tower are numbered according to the part of the country they serve. In the tower a man works an automatic device which alters the points outside according to which siding, or road’ as it’s called, the wagons should run into. On each set of rails there is a retarder which is used to slow the wagons down to the right speed for running into the siding.
* Now here are the men in the control tower. This, by the way, is at Toton, near Nottingham, but the principle is exactly the same. On the desk are lines which correspond to the tracks; and the buttons, which have a sort of miniature signpost on them, are turned round to move the points at the entrance to the yard. The older man is holding a microphone in his hand by which he can speak through loud speakers to the men on duty outside in the marshalling yard.
* You’ve already seen quite a good deal about railway working. But I wonder if you realise that everything you have already seen would come to a complete standstill without power...
* Power which you see here is in its simplest form. These three giants are of the type which takes main-line express trains from King’s Cross, London, to Yorkshire, Newcastle, and Scotland. The one on the right, incidentally, is being swung round on a turntable by the man holding the lever.
* I think I may safely say that Britain makes the best steam engines in the world. We still pin our faith mainly to steam engines, for economic and other reasons, but that is not to say that British Railways avoid using other forms of power. Diesel and diesel-electric engines are in constant use, and the line from Manchester to Sheffield, for example, when it is electrified, will be run entirely by electric locomotives...
* Here is one of them being pushed on to the train ferry at Harwich on its way to Holland for trials on the Dutch electrified railway system. On the top of the locomotive, folded fiat, you can see the pantograph.
* And yet power – steam, diesel, or electric – could not drive this vast and intricate machine of British Railways without what you might call the permanent installations of the railways – track, stations, bridges, warehouses. As far as track is concerned, our forefathers did their job well. We do not often have to lay new railways. But when we do, even before the track itself can be laid the ground must be prepared.
* Here is a picture of such an engineering job actually in progress – at Toton marshalling yards. It was necessary, in order to moderise the yard, to remove a hill fifty feet high, and to do this job the railway engineers used twelve mechanical excavators hauled by army tanks. You see one of them getting ready to go into action here. This excavator slices earth off the surface of the ground and dumps it in a box behind for clearing.
* Though we don’t often need to lay new railways, we do need to maintain those which have already been put down...
* ... and that’s what is going on here. This picture taken at Pilning, on the main line between London and South Wales, near the Severn Tunnel, shows how track laid nowadays is already assembled.
* The special crane you see travels up and down the neighbouring track lifting up the old track bodily in rail lengths, and putting new, pre-assembled lengths of track in place.
* The fiat wagons which brought the new track are used to take away the old.
* The track shown here is the well-known bull-head type of track that has been used so long by British Railways.
* Recently, however, a new type of track using flat-bottomed rail has become the standard, and this is a stretch of main line near Langley (Bucks) laid with this new type of track.
* The rails here are laid directly on cast-iron plates and are held in place by resilient steel spikes. This type of track is, of course, also laid in pre-assembled lengths by cranes like the one you have just seen.
* Here you have something different. This is Clapham Junction, in South London. It is the busiest railway junction in the worid. More than two thousand five hundred trains pass through here every twenty-four hours – that is an average of two a minute all through the day and night. Actually, at the peak period, there is a train passing about every twenty seconds, and it has been worked out that about two thousand passengers ride through the station every minute during the morning and evening peak periods. The trains go between London and the suburbs, and to the South Coast, Portsmouth and the West of England. You can see that Clapham is really two stations – one over on the left, and one on the right. You can see the platforms, roofed in, and the footbridge which connects all the platforms. There is a train going to London – that’s towards the bottom of the picture – and several other locomotives and trains, too.
* I suppose one could imagine a railway system without station buildings, but platforms and somewhere to shelter while waiting for the train make travelling much pleasanter
* And here you can see what British Railways are doing in this direction today. This is a suburban station in the electrified Southern Region south of London. It has a frequent train service, so there’s no need for build-ings on any elaborate scale. Most people, indeed, pro-bably wait no more than five minutes here for their business train in the morning. None the less, I think you’ll agree that it’s a credit to the railways.
* And there’s quite a science in designing railway stations. Let me show you what I mean by a photograph of a much bigger station altogether...
* Waterloo Station, London. This is what is called the concourse. To the left are the platforms, and to the right, the booking offices, refreshment rooms and general offices. Behind these is the approach road. The passenger comes first to the booking offices, then goes out on to the concourse and passes the timetables in the middle of the open space: he then comes to the train indicator, and finally arrives at the platforms themselves. The station is arranged so that the passenger comes across everything in the right order.
* Now so far you’ve heard what might be called the outside story of the railways. But there’s an inside story, too – the story of a whole organisation of which the ordinary man or woman knows little. British Railways, for instance, build almost all the steam locomotives they use...
* Here’s a picture taken inside the railway locomotive works at Darlington, showing one little aspect of the work there – an operator holding a white-hot steel buckle which he will drop over the locomotive spring you can see below it. The chalk marks show where the buckle will be fixed. Then, when it cools, the metal will contract and bind those pieces of steel together in a grip which nothing will break.
* Here’s another picture taken inside a locomotive works, showing three men putting a tyre on a locomotive driving-wheel. Train wheels have tyres just the same as carts; they serve the same purpose, and they’re put on in the same way. You know that metal expands when it is heated. Well, when the tyre which is lying on the floor here, is heated by the squarish gas burners arranged round it, it will expand sufficiently to let the wheel slip inside it. And then, when the tyre cools, it grips the wheel tightly and the whole wheel is ready for the track. The tyre, of course, saves the wheel from getting worn, and can be renewed if necessary like the iron tyre of a farm cart.
* Now here you can see that locomotive wheel, or one like it, with its tyre in place, waiting for the time when it can be fitted in place in the locomotive being built on the right. When the time comes for this loco to have its wheels put on, it will be swung in the air, the wheels will be arranged in place underneath it, and it will slowly be lowered on to them.
* Just as important as the work of building locomotives is that of keeping them in repair. Routine examinations of locomotives and coaches keep up the railway’s safety standards.
* All locomotives go through a routine test by qualified fitters each day, and the greater the total mileage covered the more detailed the examination becomes. After about a hundred and twenty thousand miles they return to the shops for general repair.
* Now that you’ve seen these pictures of locomotives being built and tested it won’t surprise you to learn that British Railways make nearly all their own coaches.
* This is the Southern Region railway works at Eastleigh, in Hampshire, with men at work on a new steel coach. In the foreground you can see three coach ends. If you travel at all on this Region’s electric services you will probably recognise these steel coaches as similar to those in use on London suburban services.
* And now I want to take you into the very heart of the railway system. You have probably realised that all these trains and stations and workshops and the power which drives them would be useless without the guiding hand of man, the brain behind it all.
* And here, in one of the nerve centres of British Railways, you find the men who have the minute-to-minute responsibility for the movement of goods and passenger trains in their area. This is the central control at Manchester for the Central Division of the London Midland Region, where trains are directed throughout the system shown on the map on the wall. Each man is responsible for a section, which is mapped out in straight lines in front of him. He knows where every train is that comes into his section and he can speak, through his telephone attachment, to every signal box in his section, telling them which trains should have priority and which route they should travel by.
* But that’s not the only kind of control room we have on British Railways...
* I think you’ll agree that here we have something really out of the ordinary in railway working. What a difference from the days of the colliery locomotive! The men who sit in these chairs don’t even control trains. They have the job of controlling power, for here they regulate, by means of these buttons on the desk, the flow of electricity into the various sections of the newly electrified line from Liverpool Street to Shenfield. On the screen at the back is a diagram ,of the line and its electric installations, from Liverpool Street on the left to Shenfield on the right.
* The men in train control rooms such as that at Manchester do their work by giving instructions to signal boxes, each of which controls a small section of line. There are some ten thousand signal boxes in Britain, and about twenty thousand miles of line – a signal box for every two miles of railway. I may also mention that there are about twenty thousand locomotives. on British Railways.
* This is the signal box at Waterloo Station, London. The diagrams on the wall show all the lines running into the platforms and every set of points and signals under the signalman’s control. The line is divided into sections which light up to show the passage of a train. Railway-men call these sections ‘blocks’. One train isn’t allowed into a block as long as there’s another train in it. In this signal box you see they have small hand levers to control the points and signals, which are power operated.
* Britain has the safest railways in the world largely because of good signalling equipment, complete fencing of the track, raised platforms at all stations and close and detailed examinations of rolling stock and locomotives. And what we call block working is the very basis of our signalling system. No train can be signalled into the block section while there’s another train in it. In many areas, too, one of the running rails carries a small electric current, and as soon as it is occupied by the passage of a train the signals are automatically locked against any other trains trying to enter that portion of the track. This system is known as ‘track circuiting’.
* All these things are the result of years of experience and research, and the testing and double-testing of engines, track, bridges, and signals, in all kinds of conditions before and after use.
* This, for instance, isn’t an accident; it’s a locomotive being tested for balance at the Doncaster Locomotive works; and the fact that locomotives are so stable is due to good design, experience, and careful testing before use.
* Now that locomotive isn’t what is called ‘live’ – it hasn’t got steam up...
* But this one here is not only live – it’s travelling at anything up to a hundred miles an hour, or would be if it were on rails instead of rollers. You see it here at the Rugby locomotive testing station, the most modern in the world, where engineers can walk round and examine locomotives when they are, to all intents and purposes, travelling at speed.
* At present there are some 400 different types of loco-motives in Britain, but, by incorporating the best qualities of these different types, the work of the British Railways of the future can be handled by no more than twelve varieties (or standard types). Those qualities can only be assessed by testing the locomotives against each other inthe same conditions. And that’s what is going on here. In the case of ‘The Garth’ it’s the valve gear which is being tested .
* Here’s another way in which testing is carried out – in what is known as a dynamometer car coupled to the locomotive itself. This is the inside of such a car; this one belongs to the London Midland Region. Behind this coach is an ordinary train, and the men you see here are measuring, with the help of recording instruments, the amount of pull, in pounds, on the drawbar which con-nects the locomotive with the rest of the train. They take other measurements too, and can find out a great deal about the locomotive’s performance under all sorts of conditions of running.
* So scientists and technicians help to run the railway. But there are men in equally vital jobs in all parts of the railway service, and on all of them depends the smooth running of this great organisation.
* You know these men, or men very like them – the guard, the engine driver and the fireman; they represent a whole army of experienced railwaymen whom we trust so confidently every time we travel by train. This picture is so alive that it seems almost unnecessary to talk about it at all. The guard is telling the driver the total weight of the train and checking up details of the run with him. But at times railwaymen have a chance of turning to less exacting tasks, and indeed, our countryside would not be so attractive to the visitor from overseas if we did not keep up that reputation which many of our little stations have for tidiness and beauty.
* Here you see the staff of the little country station of Elsenham on the line from London to Cambridge, tending their garden under the approving eye of the stationmaster. Many enter competitions for the best-kept station in their Region, and no little credit is given for the beautiful displays of flowers such as you see here.
* But the railwayman’s work isn’t always concerned with trains and stations. Ships, for instance, are run by British Railways, and their crews are railwaymen.
* Here’s the motor vessel Farringford, which was brought into service in March 1948. She does the short trip between Lymington in Hampshire and Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. She’s a diesel-electric passenger and motor-car ferry and, as you can see, motor vehicles can be driven straight aboard her. What is more, she’s double-ended, so that the vehicles can be driven ashore from the other end, when the crossing is over, without having to turn round. The Farringford can go at the same speed ahead or astern. she has duplicate controls in the twin wheel-houses, and two rudders at each end. In fact, you can go or come back without noticing the difference really. She carries 320 passengers and 32 cars, or 800 passengers without cars.
* Here’s something bigger – that fine ship, the Falaise, the Southern Region’s first post-war vessel. She was designed for all kinds of cross-Channel. work. Now she’s in service on the Southampton – St. Malo route to France, and during the summer months has taken passen-gers on weekend cruises from England, across the Channel and up the river Seine as far as Rouen – and all for nine guineas! She has also run between Dover and Calais on the short sea route to the Continent. Voyagers think her one of the steadiest of cross-Channel ships, for she has underwater fins six feet wide which can be extended in rough weather to reduce rolling. They are operated by a press-button on the bridge.
* Here, on her trials off Holyhead, is the motor vessel Hibernia, one of the ships in which passengers by the Irish Mail from Euston to Holyhead travel to complete their journey to Dublin. She’s a ship of over 5,000 tons, and has accommodation for 2,000 passengers. She and her sister ship Cambria are among Britain’s largest cross-Channel vessels. Hibernia, of course, is the ancient name for Ireland, and Cambria that for Wales.
* Now let’s get back to railways and some of the things that are happening on them today. On this map I can show you one quite small bit of re-routing, typical of many, that has become possible since the four companies were unified. In the old days, if you wanted to travel from Glasgow to Oban you had to go right round here (on the old L.N.E. route) via Stirling. But now that all the rail-ways in Scotland are part of the Scottish Region, trains can run the short way from Glasgow to Oban via Helens-burgh and Crianlarich. At Crianlarich the trains are transferred between the old North British (West Highland) line and the former Caledonian Line.
* This photograph was taken when the first train ran over the shorter route from Glasgow to Oban. The train is just about to transfer to the line to Callander and Oban. This new routing has substantially reduced the journey-time for the Glasgow-Oban journey.
* In fact there is always something new about railways, even if it’s just seeing one of the named trains
* – like the Golden Arrow – for the first time. This famous train takes passengers to Dover for the short sea route to the Continent. Here it is leaving Victoria Station, London. It’s an all-Pullman train and, as you see in this picture, the locomotive bears not only the golden arrow on its front and sides but the flags of Britain and France as well.
* This train is noted for its comfort – even luxury – its cleanliness and its good time-keeping. But these virtues, especially the good time-keeping, are not confined to one or two famous expresses on British Railways. The ordinary work-a-day trains have them too.
* Here’s a typical example of what I mean – one of the fast electric trains that maintain a regular service between London and Portsmouth. They are un-named and don’t normally catch the public eye, but every day, regularly as clockwork, one leaves Waterloo each hour for the journey t6 Portsmouth, providing the passenger with one of the pleasantest short trips it is possible to take by train in Britain. Current for the electric motors which drive the train is picked up from the conductor rail through a metal collector shoe which slides along it. The conductor rail is laid outside the running rails.
* Here’s something else that’s new – the gas turbine locomotive. Don’t make the usual mistake and refer to it as a ‘jet’ loco – it isn’t. So far, jet propulsion, which means driving something along by expelling a high speed jet of air at the back, is only applicable to aircraft. This loco is driven by a gas turbine motor in which the large quantities of air which it inhales are compressed in a compressor and heated in a combustion chamber. The air emerges from the combustion chamber at high speed and drives a turbine, and this turbine drives an electric generator. The current which the generator makes is used to drive four traction motors, two in each bogie. The locomotive’s maximum speed-is ninety miles an hour. It is 63 feet long and weighs’ 115 tons. It can carry enough fuel for a 250-mile run. It uses diesel oil to start, and then when it is warmed up it switches over to heavy furnace fuel oil. British Railways think that this type of power unit should be much easier to maintain than (for example) a diesel engine, and that the loco will therefore be available for service on a greater number of days per year. This gas turbine loco was built in Switzerland. At the time it was ordered the Swiss engineers had already had about six years’ successful experience with the world’s first and only gas turbine locomotive which they had designed and constructed. Number 18000 will undergo very thorough tests for a long time, so that all the facts about its performance, fuel consumption and hauling capacity, freedom from mechanical trouble and so on can be discovered and studied. A gas turbine loco which will be more powerful than No. 18000 is under con-struction in this country now. ‘But no one would dream of suggesting that the age of the steam locomotive is past in Britain.
* Indeed, for many years to come British Railways will have to depend mainly on the steam locomotive. Whether it’s intended for shunting or hauling goods trains, or for passenger expresses, as this one is, the steam loco is still a satisfactory piece of mechanism, and it is as fast as any rival form of traction. This particular engine is called Mallard. In 1938 it set up a world speed record of 126 miles an hour – and that’s fast enough for any loco to travel. Incidentally, this picture was taken at Exeter during the 1948 locomotive exchanges when engines were tried out away from their usual territory – in the case of Mallard on the main line from King’s Cross to the North. The results of these tests will help in designing the dozen or so standard locomotives I have already told you about.
* Passenger trains are usually thought of as the spectacular part of railway working.
* But goods trains too are not without romance. Many who love trains would just as soon be travelling through the Scottish Highlands in the guard’s van of this train as they would be going off on the Golden Arrow for a week in Paris. The railways of Britain partake of the beauty and magic of the country, and whoever has the unforgettable experience of travelling through the length of England on a summer’s day in such a train as this...
* ...a Scottish express being hauled by two diesel-electric engines through the beautiful Lune valley in Westmorland – has known the joys which the railways can bring to those who love the places, and the people, and the history of Britain.
This work is in the public domain worldwide because it was created by a public body of the United Kingdom with Crown Status and commercially published before 1974.
See Crown copyright artistic works, Crown copyright non-artistic works and List of Public Bodies with Crown Status.
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