Heritage Railway Issue 304

LESS thanafortnightafterA3PacificNo. 60103 Flying Scotsman celebrated the 100th anniversary to the day that it ventured forth from Doncaster Works on a journey that would see it become not only the world’s most famous steam locomotive, but also the first to circumnavigate it, the legendary locomotive has added a new chapter to its illustrious history. Thanks to the National Railway Museum and a team of ladies from the East Lancashire Railway, where it is currently based, the A3 marked International Women’s Day by running three round trips of the heritage line at the hands of an allfemale crew for the first time. The event despatched several highly positivelycharged messages to all four corners of the globe, hopefully including those where women’s rights to equal opportunities are still, in the 21st century,…

ONE hundred years to the day it moved for the first time out of Doncaster Works to enter LNER traffic as the first of Nigel Gresley’s Pacifics, A3 No. 60103 Flying Scotsman, complete with support coach, appeared at a special celebratory birthday event at Edinburgh Waverley station. Organised by the National Railway Museum, the event was off-limits to the general public and had not been publicly announced – unlike its centenary launch at King’s Cross on October 14 (as highlighted in issue 299) – and took travellers at the station by complete surprise. To mark the occasion, Poet Laurate Simon Armitage read his new work, The Making of Flying Scotsman (a phantasmagoria), while dancers from the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society and South Morningside Primary School performed ‘The Flying Scotsman’,…

© Simon Armitage 2023 The blueprint came from the future, plans for a spaceship powered by water and coal; they fired up the furnace with kindling and oily rags and strong-armed the bellows till the flames sang. In went the chainmail and breastplates of knights for the casings, shields for the footplate. For the boiler they threw in an ancient vat that once distilled present from past. For the frame, suspension bridges were commandeered. In the forge, blacksmiths practiced their dark arts. They needed more heat: in went ovens, braziers, kilns, quartered segments of sun, in went anthracite kernels that burned with blue breath. For the firebox they used the Bank of England’s inmost vault, locked with a bombproof door, in it went, and rivets grown from the knuckles of…

A COLLECTORS’set of 12 stamps depicting Flying Scotsman – which comprises the last special stamps to carry the silhouette portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II – was released by Royal Mail on March 9. A further four stamps in a miniature sheet illustrate railway poster art from the 1920s and 1930s. The silhouette of The Queen, adapted from a 1953 design by sculptor Mary Gillick, has featured on all special stamps since 1968. Future special stamps will feature a silhouette of King Charles III. The stamps, which are available in a presentation pack, depict Flying Scotsman at locations including Pickering station on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, Ribblehead Viaduct in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, steaming through Blyth in Northumberland, in a blizzard at Heap Bridge on the East…

IN anothermajorfirstinitsproud100- year history, Flying Scotsman was crewed by an all-female team for three round trips on the East Lancashire Railway to mark InternationalWomen’s Day on March 8. The ground-breaking crew comprised three ELR volunteers in Linda Henderson, Charlotte Instance and Steph Elwood, along with Beth Furness from Network Rail, who drove the A3. Linda began volunteering at the ELR in 1993 at just 14 years old, along with her mum and younger brother. Throughout the years she has taken on many different roles at the railway, including dispatcher and signal operations manager, and in March 2017 she became the ELR’s first-ever female main line locomotive driver. Steph joined the ELR team in October 2021 with a background in maintenance and repair, eager to push herself further and build on…

THE Royal Mint has launched its collectable £2 coin in several formats to mark Flying Scotsman’s centenary in collaboration with the National Railway Museum, part of the Science Museum Group. The coin, as reported in Headline News, issue 302, features the inscription LNER followed by 4472, Flying Scotsman’s second service number, as well as the date of the locomotive’s centenary. The design captures a side-on view of the locomotive steaming. The edge inscription reads ‘Live for the Journey’, a fitting tribute to a locomotive that continues to be admired 100 years since it emerged from Doncaster Works. The colour version of the coin was officially released on February 21. The last coloured £2 coin was issued more than 20 years ago. Ffion Gwillim, in the Royal Mint’s design team, ensured…