back to article Fifty years later, steam appears on British railway

A Peppercorn class A1 Pacific traveled from York to Scarborough on Tuesday evening, becoming the first new steam train to run on Britain's railway since 1960. The steam locomotive - No. 60163 Tornado - departed the National Railway Museum in York at 6:04pm, arrived at York station by 6:18, and reached the coast at 8:12, The …

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  1. Jonathan

    re: "Pedant II" (and "It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry" )

    Pedant II

    sorry to be pedantic, but... you forgot your backslash..

    <Pedant subtype="gricer">

    blah.. blah

    </Pedant>

    and then...

    "Surely they can't be using coal to heat the water. Shouldn't they be using a small nuclear reactor? I wonder if that would be more efficient than using a nuclear reactor to drive a turbine to produce electricity to drive the train, all on-board of course."

    Though I'd read a bit recently about how environmentally clean new coal-powered plants could be in comparison to oil and gas (and ho wmuch of the stuff is still lying under the ground in the UK) ?

  2. Anonymous John
    Coat

    Maximum speed: 50mph.

    No problem. It takes me an hour and a half to get to London by train, and it's only about 50 miles away.

    Mine's the one covered with soot.

  3. David Jackson
    Boffin

    Last Steam

    The last standard gauge steam on British Rail ran in 1968, but for longer on London Underground and in industry. BR retained narrow gauge stream for many years after that.

  4. blackworx
    Coat

    @Sceptical Bastard

    Very informative comment, cheers.

    <sadcase>But, since we're on a pedantic bent, it's "till" not "til".</sadcase>

    Mine's the one with the well-thumbed copy of Fowler's in the pocket. No, not that one, the one with the pages stuck together.

  5. Dick

    But did they cook breakfast

    on the shovel?

  6. blackworx
    Alert

    @ John Lodge

    OMG you're not, like, THE John Lodge, legendary Moody Blues bassist and time-served musical genius are you???!!!1!one

  7. Ed
    Coat

    @Andy Taylor - 7ft Gauge

    The railway bridges, cuttings, embankments and tunnels are civil engineering. The gauge of the track laid on it is not.

    Whilst a boarder gauge is better (which is why the Russians, Spanish, Irish and others use 5' 3"), the rest of the Britain at the time was being covered with 4' 8.5" gauge track.

    Mine is the one with the gauging bar in the pocket, ta!

  8. Ceiling Cat
    Coat

    Why always nuclear?

    Surely, instead of Nuclear power, they could (at the very least) have used the industrial equivalent of an electric Kettle element + Condensing system to conserve water? they could have even drawn power off the caternary or 3rd rails, although that would spoil the appearance a tad.

    Not that the old way isn't cool to see.

    Mine's the one with a copy of Trainz in the pocket.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Pictures - did I miss the bleedin' pictures

    And will you be allowed to photograph this thing without having some lol rozzer give you a load of grief? If we don't get pictures it doesn't exist. At least give us the HO version.

  10. A

    Re: But did they cook breakfast

    I can't say for sure on that run, but there was a program about this loco on BBC Four recently, and in that we saw them make a fryup on the shovel of their shiny new A1.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    WTF?

    Boo!

    More polution!

  12. Warhelmet

    Anthracite

    Poop! Poop!

    I live on the Paddington mainline - the old GWR line to south wales and the south-west. I see steam trains chuffing along from my back garden on an infrequent basis.

    One of the big criticism of coal power is that it is dirty. No. There is good coal and bad coal. GWR generally used anthracite from wales which has a very high carbon content and doesn't produce horrible smoke in the way that lower grade coals do. I know that some of the small gauge railways have converted old steamers to run on oil because it's notionally cleaner than low-grade coal. Also, am I right in thinking that there were small trains that ran on sugar plantations that used distilled ethanol?

    Whilst I welcome the building of a new mainline stream train, I would have preferred them to build something genuinely novel and utilising modern concepts rather than a duplicate of 70 year old tech. That would have been something really interested to see. A train for the third world, perhaps. Mechanically simple, but more efficient.

    As long as the result wasn't Ivor the Engine.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Though...

    there could be created a vapour steam clone version. (!)

  14. Anonymous John

    I for one,

    welcome our new steam-powered overlords.

  15. Tim99 Silver badge

    @Ferry Boat - Electric Traction

    Almost all larger "Diesel" locomotives use electric traction motors. The power is generated from the engine driving an alternator. The power from the alternator then drives the traction motors. It is common for each axle/bogie to have its own traction motor driven off the one alternator.

    It can be argued that the French already have nuclear powered trains as nuclear power stations already generate most of the electricity used to power SNCF trains...

  16. Gareth Jones Silver badge

    @Warhelmet

    The reason they built a new A1 was that no Peppercorn A1s were preserved. Nothing to do with any great need for steam engines or any technical experiments. Basically because they wanted to. There was no actual need for a steam engine to run on main lines, there are more than enough existing engines certified to run on main lines to fulfil the required role of pulling specials. I for one would rather be pulled by a genuine historic engine than a recreation.

    There are those who would argue that the reason no Peppercorn A1s were preserved is that they weren't actually very good.

    If somebody really wanted to build an old fashioned engine brought up to modern standards then the logical starting point was the 9F class alluded to in the article, those last engined built in 1960. Capable of hauling the heaviest freight trains and still pulling an express at 90mph. That was arguably the epitome of British mainline steam design. However they wouldn't want to do that because there are still some 9F's around.

    Of course if you wanted to build a modern steam engine you would probably be looking at a steam turbine driving an alternator. Which is of course pretty much what we have with electric trains, it's just that the steam turbine is miles away from the train.

  17. David Jackson
    Boffin

    Turbine

    Of couse the LMS did try turbine power with the Turbomotive 6202 and it worked quite well. It's a pity the concept wasn't developed further.

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