THE launch of The Railway Magazine in 1897 came almost at the halfway point of Britain’s 143-year steam age, which began with the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway on September 27, 1825 and ended with British Railways’ ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’ on August 11, 1968. The magazine could not have been launched at a better time, for 72 years of frenzied development had transformed life for everyone and, with the 20th century just around the corner, the pinnacle was yet to come.
1897 also marked the formation of the last of the great pre-Grouping railway companies when the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway changed its name to the Great Central Railway in anticipation of its London Extension that would be completed in 1899 (see also pages 36-41).
Express passenger locomotives were knocking on the door of 90mph. One of Francis William Webb’s celebrated London & North Western Railway ‘Improved Precedent’ 2-4-0s, No. 2002 Madge, had already been timed at 88mph. Then in 1895 – only two years before the launch of this magazine – another member of the class No. 790 Hardwicke, now preserved at the National Railway Museum in York, averaged 67mph over the 141 miles from Crewe to Carlisle during a leg of the fabled ‘Races to the North’ between London and Aberdeen, in which the competing East and West Coast routes pulled out all the stops in their bids to get there first.
In his 1958 book about the races, O SNock – who wrote no fewer than 264 ‘British Locomotive Practice & Performance’ articles for The RM between 1959 and 1980 – described the fastest run of them all, when a flyweight train of just three coaches left Euston at 20.00 on August 22, 1895 for the 539.7-mile journey (compared with the East Coast’s 523.20 miles) to Aberdeen, and reached the Granite City at 04.40 against the timetabled arrival time of 08.55! “At that astonishing average speed of 63.3mph,” wrote Ossie in 1958, “the London-Aberdeen record still stands today.”