LITMIR.BIZ

      Perhaps you can imagine Mallard coming down the track on Sunday, 3 July 1938. The engine, tender and cars are blue, although whether you’ll be able to see this as it speeds past you is questionable. There is also a rickety brown carriage early in the chain, known as a dynamometer car, and within this are men with stopwatches and machines that resemble primitive lie detectors and heart monitors. The train is travelling so fast that it appears to be ‘hunting’, the phrase engineers use to describe a locomotive hurtling at such a velocity that it is swaying from side to side, as if it was searching for the fastest route to its destination, happy to jump to another track if need be. Its destination is London, but it will overheat long before then.

      You are watching the train from Stoke Bank, not far from Grantham. The threat of war hovers. Twelve-year-old Margaret Roberts is at school up the road. The hurtling train, and its memory, will swiftly become one of those iconic pre-war images, like the last of the country-house shooting parties before Britain went dark. What it is about to do will never be bettered, and the anniversaries – 25th, 50th, 60th and so on – just can’t come soon enough. People who love trains love this train as much as they love anything.

      Similar locomotives in this group, known as A4 Pacifics, were designed to look and perform like Mallard, and their engineer Nigel Gresley gave them all similar names: Wild Swan, Herring Gull, Guillemot, Bittern and Seagull.² But to Gresley – 62, in failing health, his designs internationally recognised and copied, his trains, including the Flying Scotsman, lauded for both safety and comfort, an engineer comparable in achievement to the Stephensons and Brunel – none of them appeared to be chosen like Mallard, with her dynamic lines and increased cylinder pressure, and her new brake valves, double chimney and blast-pipe maximising steam production.

      At Stoke Bank it has its chance. The ride through Grantham has been slow due to track maintenance, but it has reached Stoke Summit at 75 mph and accelerates now over a long downhill stretch. The speeds at the end of each mile from the summit were recorded as: 87½, 96½, 104, 107, 111½, 116 and 119 mph. The subsequent half-mile readings then gave 120¾, 122½, 123, 124¼.³ And so Joe Duddington, aged 61, an Englishman based in Doncaster, employed by the London and North Eastern Railway since its formation in 1921, and Mallard’s driver that day, pushed her on a little as she thundered past the Lincolnshire village of Little Bytham. ‘She just jumped to life like a live thing!’ he would recall a few years later. ‘Folks in the [dynamometer] car held their breath.’ The train achieved a top speed of 125.88 miles per hour, a steam record that stands to this day.

      Time passed. Seventy-five years later, a great gathering of 90 old-timers assembled at the National Railway Museum in York to talk of crewing Mallard and manning the sheds, and to tour another great gathering in the main hall, all six of the surviving A4 streamliners (of 35 built), huge and gleaming, a product of England: Mallard, Dominion of Canada, Bittern, Union of South Africa, Sir Nigel Gresley and Dwight D. Eisenhower. They were all wonderful engines, but Mallard had the celebrity status – the fastest, the only one purchasable in 130 parts, its creator’s favourite – and it did seem to glow more than others, the way Marilyn Monroe or Cary Grant used to. And, as with movie stars, adults who should know better sighed in the train’s presence, as if they weren’t worthy, as if the train was of a different and higher species. Iron and man-made as it was, it was also a deity, shining huge above us. I queued up to step on its boiler plate, and I would have put on overalls and cap and begun shovelling coal if they had let me.

      Trains, and steam trains in particular, serve as the holding pen for deep male longing. For a person over 70, the notion of ‘times past’ usually invokes foggy stations and whistles and the presence of grime. A great hall with men dragging tired wives around, lots of plastic bags with lots of souvenirs – it could only be childhood revisited at a railway museum; the French would have locked you away for such nostalgia.

      I specifically went to hear one of the old-timers, a man named Alf Smith. Smith was 92, funny and direct, the fireman (coal-shoveller and oiler) on the boiler plate of Mallard for almost four years, and ‘I never had a bad day, never had a bad day’. He spoke of his driver and his train with deep respect, telling a story of how, when the pair were lodging overnight and came down for their cooked breakfast, his driver would scrape three-quarters of his meal from his plate and give it to him. ‘Not once, not twice, but every day that we was there, that’s what he done. I said to him, “Joe, what are you doing?” He said, “I can get home on a bloody egg, you’ve got the work to do – eat it!” Mallard was part of our story. Well, it was our story. That was my engine.’ His engine was being mobbed downstairs as he spoke. In the shop, the train was basking in the glory of an anniversary, which meant posters and magnets on sale, and small tins of garter-blue paint suitable for modelling.

      Speed records on trains tend to be maintained for a long time: you push the absolute limit for a few miles, and then safety concerns or a basic lack of ambition seals the record shut for decades. The London to Aberdeen run, for example, took 8 hours 40 minutes in 1895 and didn’t get any faster for 80 years. In the mid-1930s it took about 2 hours 20 minutes from London to Liverpool, and we have shaved barely 15 minutes from this. But in the twenty-first century the train is once more beholden to records and speed. The birthplace of the railways has come relatively late to this party; HS2, the first phase of which is due to open in 2026, will cut the journey between London and Birmingham from 1 hour 24 minutes to just 49 minutes.

      Elsewhere in the world, progress has been faster. In Spain in 2010, the 205 mph AVE S-112, a train shaped like and nicknamed ‘The Duck’, cut the time it takes to get from Madrid to Valencia by more than two hours, to 1 hour 50 minutes. In the same year, travellers between St Petersburg and Helsinki managed the cross-border trip in 3 hours 30 minutes, two hours faster than before the Sm6 Allegro arrived from its works in Italy. In China, the CRH380, new in 2011, travelled at 186 mph to cut the journey from Beijing to Shanghai to less than half the journey time in 2010: from 10 hours to 4 hours 45 minutes. And, with a certain inevitability, Japan has gone a little faster than everyone: in April 2015, on a test track near Mount Fuji, its Maglev (‘magnetic levitation’) train, hovering 10cm above the track, carried 49 passengers at a speed of 374 mph, smoothly outgunning the French TGV. It is expected to begin service in 2027 between Tokyo and Nagoya, a journey of 165 miles that it should manage in 40 minutes, half the time of the current Shinkansen bullet train.

      But for the most extraordinary advance of all we need to go back to the birth of the idea of the train, and a sooty dawn in pre-Victorian north-west England.

ii) Was Ever Tyranny More Monstrous?

      On the day it opened in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway revolutionised the way we thought about our lives. The fact that it linked the thriving cotton mills to a major shipping port about 30 miles away is almost incidental. The steam engine both shrunk and expanded the world; it enhanced trade; it hastened the spread of ideas; it fired global industry. And more than any other invention – save the clock itself and possibly the space rocket – the railways changed our appreciation of time.

      The train

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