IF you had the chance to select the locomotive and train for a final steamhauled trip from King’s Cross before the arrival of the ‘dreaded diesels’ (as many would have said at the time), what would you have chosen? Might it have been the combination that randomly befell Newcastlebased train timer Alan Middlemiss one afternoon in July 1959?
As he walked down the platform alongside the crack ‘Talisman’ express, Alan was unaware this would be his last Gresley Pacific run from the capital, but he had quickly come to relish his journeys home on this new service. Introduced in 1956, and named after one of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, the London to Edinburgh ‘Talisman’ was booked to run nonstop from King’s Cross to Newcastle; 268 miles in 268min. It had briefly become the ‘Afternoon Talisman’ when supplemented by a morning equivalent, but it had since reverted to the original name.
The 1959 schedule had been decelerated by 2min, apparently to accommodate additional engineering work, disappointingly robbing it of a prestige 60mph start-to-stop booking, but this ‘lodge job’ remained a stiff task for the King’s Cross crew and their Pacific. Classes A1, A3 and A4 used to share the work apparently randomly, and there is even a log of A2/3 No. 60515 Sun Stream clocking the occasional 90mph. As Mr Middlemiss approached the front of the nine-coach formation, he noted that today it was an ‘A3’, but not just any ‘A3’, this was the 100mph record-holding No. 60103 Flying Scotsman itself.