STEAM locomotives had been going faster for years: trains that in the 1870s rarely touched 40 mph were regularly hitting eighty in the 1890s, and on May 9th, 1904, journalist Charles Rous-Marten timed the Great Western Railway’s ‘City of Truro’ at an unheard-of 100 mph, during a Plymouth to London Paddington run. So soon after Preston, the feat was all but hushed up, but thirty years on the public mood was different. On November 30th, 1934, driver Bill Sparshatt coaxed No. 4472 ‘Flying Scotsman’ to an official 100 mph, hauling a special train laden with precision instruments, and the LNER squeezed as much publicity out of it as possible.
Although British Railways kept faith with steam traction after nationalisation, it announced in 1962 that ‘Flying Scotsman’ would be scrapped. A public subscription failed to raise £3000 to buy it,* but businessman Alan Pegler stepped in to save the historic engine, which is still working trains up and down the country to this day.
A Deutsche Reichsbahn Class 05 hit 124.5 mph in 1936, though the Nazi empire’s technological glory was short-lived. The LNER’s A4 ‘Mallard’ topped 126 mph on July 3rd, 1938, a record for steam locomotives that was never beaten in their heyday, and in fact has never been beaten even now.
This was the Sixties, when Harold Macmillan told the public “you’ve never had it so good” and fuelled a frenzy of architectural and cultural vandalism in the name of post-war ‘progress’.