I Know You Got Soul by Jeremy Clarkson

Author:Jeremy Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2004-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Flying Scotsman

The Flying Scotsman is exquisite to behold, partly because he's so nicely balanced and partly because he seems to shout I AM VERY POWERFUL.

Trainspotters. You still see them today, occasionally. Hunched over their Tupperware sandwich boxes and their soup at the end of railway platforms, their anorak hoods pulled tight to keep out the worst of the rain and the wind. And one word comes into your mind: why?

If I’m drunk, I can just about understand the mentality of the planespotter. There are all sorts of military aircraft to jot down in your notebook. But there are no fighter trains, no stealth locomotives. These days a train is a train is a train. A good train is one that arrives on time; a bad train is one that doesn’t turn up at all.

In the olden days, when there were lots of different railway companies and no such thing as economies of scale, it was a world of Jenny Agutter appearing out of the steam and Bernard Cribbins watering the station geraniums. Back then there were express trains, and locomotives used to haul coal, and the ones you saw in Yorkshire were completely different from the ones you saw in South Wales. You could meet your weird-beard mates in the snug bar of The Broken Conrod and reminisce about the day you saw the Atlantic Class 4-6-2 in the WRONG livery!!! There was a point to trainspotting. Not a very big one, I admit, and not a very sharp one either, but a point nevertheless.

Now though, the spottiest teenagers can spend their evenings downloading pornography from the internet. In fact if push came to shove, I bet you could only name one of the 660,000 steam locomotives that have been made around the world.

The Gresley Pacific 4472. Better known as the Flying Scotsman.

For those who were born in Doncaster—Kevin Keegan, Diana Rigg and, er, me—it’s a bit galling to know that the town’s most famous son is, in fact, a train, and not a very good one either.

It was chosen to represent the London & North Eastern Railway company at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, not because it was their finest achievement but because they needed something and the Scotsman was broken at the time.

After the show it was repaired and selected to represent the LNER again, in a speed-and-economy race against the best of the best from the Great Western Railway. The northern boy turned out to be slower and more coal hungry than its southern rival.

Of course, the Flying Scotsman’s designers and owners said this was irrelevant. As was the way with the world’s steamship companies, they said they didn’t go in for speed records because this would mean pushing the machinery beyond its limit and that would be dangerous. Yeah right.

In fact they quietly took their engine back to its Doncaster birthplace and fettled it a bit to make it faster. And what’s more, they fitted a corridor in the coal tender that was dragged behind the

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