Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

I’d been looking forward to seeing the new A1 locomotive 60163 Tornado, ever since it took to the rails in 2008.  I caught up with it at the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event in April 2012 – a well-organised facility for connoisseurs of locomotives to stand and stare at them and, in many cases, take photographs.

I happened to find my way to the trackside at the moment when a large, loudly hissing cloud of steam advanced down the line.  By the time it came alongside, anyone with a camera needed to shield their lens against the fog of cool condensation that completely enveloped us.

The cloud turned out to contain 60019 Bittern, one of the glorious streamlined A4 Pacifics now displayed in garter-blue livery.

The next cloud of steam proved to be 61994 The Great Marquess.  It was a damp, cold morning, and each loco was loudly blowing off surplus steam through its safety valves.

It’s an extraordinary sensation to stand within a few feet of a railway line, amply protected by safety fencing, as a hundred and more tons of locomotive glides past, the steam exhaust utterly deafening, the wheels and motion barely audible.

The final cloud of steam was something else.  60163 Tornado snorts and clanks and blows steam in all directions:  it’s intended to speed down long, straight stretches of main line, and doesn’t take particularly kindly to doing a catwalk turn.

Once this procession had reversed back into exhibition position I took an opportunity to look over Tornado closely.  It’s a strange beast:  it makes weird banging noises while sitting doing apparently nothing.

It is indeed a magnificent piece of engineering, built from scratch to fill the gap in the ranks of preserved main-line locomotives that ran the East Coast route in the days of steam, to the original post-war design by Arthur H Peppercorn, the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway.

In order to run on present-day main lines the design is necessarily adapted to present-day railway conditions – slightly lower than the original, fabricated with the advantages of modern engineering, equipped with the data recorders and warning protection that modern trains carry, with riding-lights that look like traditional oil lamps but are in fact LED clusters.

In effect Tornado represents the form that the original A1s would have evolved into if steam had continued in Britain after the 1960s, and it carries the “next in class” running number accordingly.  Its name commemorates the RAF Tornado pilots who flew in the first Gulf War.

The first standard-gauge steam locomotive to be built in the British Isles since 1960, Tornado has all the dignity and elegance of original museum pieces, with the added frisson of being virtually brand new.

The very sight of Tornado brought audible expressions of ecstasy from hardened rail enthusiasts.

This must have been how it felt to see Flying Scotsman, Mallard and the rest when they emerged from the workshops between the wars.  Tornado’s website is at http://www.a1steam.com.

It won’t be the last.  Other new builds of lost locomotive designs are on their way, led by a new LMS ‘Patriot’, which will take the last-in-class number 45551 and the name The Unknown Warrior as a national memorial engine, replacing the long-lost, much rebuilt original 1919 London & North Western Railway memorial locomotive, Patriot:  http://www.lms-patriot.org.uk/overview.html.

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: Fab Four event, April 13th 2012 – from left to right, 4464 Bittern, 4468 Mallard, 60103 Flying Scotsman, 4771 Green Arrow

My friend Doug, who likes trains nearly as much as he likes buses, tipped me off that the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event would be good value.

The original intention behind the title, apparently, was to reunite for the first time in preservation examples of the LNER A1, A2, A3 and A4 locomotive classes.

I had to look this up, having discarded my Ian Allan spotting books many years ago.

The A1 Pacific locomotives were all scrapped in the early 1960s, and a brand-new version, 60163 Tornado, has been painstakingly constructed.

The A2 was an updated version of the A1.  Its sole survivor is a household name, 60532 Blue Peter, which looks magnificent and only needs half a million pounds spending on its next overhaul.

The only surviving A3 is an even more familiar household name, 60103 Flying Scotsman, saved by the late Alan Pegler, doyen of railway enthusiasts.  (His obituary in The Times, March 23rd 2012, relates a life well lived:  “When the good Lord calls me to the happy shunting yard in the sky, I shall have no regrets,” he told the Railway Magazine.  “I’ve had a great innings.”)

The Fab Four plan came adrift because Flying Scotsman, nearing the end of its latest overhaul, was indisposed, so the Barrow Hill people and their sponsors, Railway Magazine, fielded two examples of the instantly familiar streamlined A4 class, LNER 4464 Bittern, which is in full working order, and the record-breaking 4468 Mallard, which is apparently regarded as so precious a piece of history that it hasn’t steamed since the 1980s.

It was a tremendous show, and drew hordes of visitors, including hard-core railway photographers who carry not only dauntingly huge cameras but also stepladders, like paparazzi.

The implicit thematic intention was to show locomotives that hauled the East Coast main line expresses between London and Edinburgh and beyond.

In addition to the Fab Four, there were other locomotives with an East Coast Route connection.

Great Northern 251, dating from 1902, spun on its own axis on the roundhouse turntable.  LNER 4771 Green Arrow, a variant version of Sir Nigel Gresley’s Pacifics, lined up with the Fab Four.  61994 The Great Marquess, a more rugged beast designed for yomping across the Scottish Highlands, pulled trains up and down the Barrow Hill demonstration track.

Barrow Hill is also the home base of the Deltic Preservation Society, which maintains in running order a roster of three of the diesel successors to the steam-powered Fab Four.

It was a fine display, beautifully organised.  I warmed to the fact that every Barrow Hill volunteer I spoke to wished me an enjoyable day.  They may have been scripted but they clearly meant it.  I admired the fact that the carriages hauled by The Great Marquess were immaculately turned out in British Railways maroon on the side that the public sees;  the other side is still in the Rail Blue livery that they brought from mainline service.

I had only one complaint about the whole experience.  The advertised advance-ticket prices were fictional.  It was practically impossible to buy a ticket in advance without paying a “transaction fee” of £1.00.

I don’t at all mind paying £15.00 rather than £14.00 for an entertainment.  But I do expect to pay the price on the price-tag.  Compulsory add-ons simply make me feel ripped off.

There’s no need for it.  It would have cost the Barrow Hill Roundhouse and the Ticket Factory nothing at all to come clean and say the cost is £1 more than they pretended.

To do otherwise leaves a nasty taste.