The LNER Encyclopedia

Hello.

I am trying to find out if a family story relating to the Flying Scotsman is true. It goes like this:

My husband's paternal grandfather, Fred, was a driver of the Flying Scotsman in World War II when it was used to take bombs up and down the country [to deliver to I assume where they would be loaded for use by aircraft]. One day, whilst on one of these journey's, he was aware the sound of the track was different to normal and looked ahead in time to stop the train before it hit an area of track that had been blown up. Had he not been experienced to know the sound of the track, the train could have crashed and the bombs it was carrying could have blown up.

He was born in 1907 in Nottinghamshire so would have been about 32-38 during the war years. In 1932 he was a railwayman living in the Station Cottage at Fledborough, near Newark, Nottinghamshire.

I would be grateful for any insights people may have as to where this could be true.

We are excited to be taking a short journey on the Flying Scotsman when it comes to Nene Valley Railway in February.

Hallo and welcome.

I found when I was researching my family history that many of these stories become distorted or confused, even to the people who were there. I was told a number of things as witnessed fact which I later found documented proof could not be true. However there's usually a kernel of information which the whole thing grew from.

So, to take what you've been told: if he was a railwayman based at or near Newark, it would be unlikely he would have driven the Flying Scotsman as it was never based in that area. It's not impossible it ended up there, especially in wartime, but unlikely. It may be he drove another of the class - there were 79 of them - but again, unlikely.

Flying Scotsman is a passenger locomotive, so again it's highly unlikely that it would have been used on a munitions working. Not impossible but highly unlikely.

If the munitions train was for an airfield or ordnance site, it would be most likely that it was in East Anglia or Lincolnshire as that was where most of the airfields were located. If that is so, then a locomotive as heavy as Flying Scotsman would be unlikely to be permitted on those routes, which were more lightly laid.

Finally, if he took his train close enough to bomb damaged track to be able to hear a difference in sound and was still able to stop it before running into the affected area. it must have been travelling very slowly, which is very hard to do with a locomotive like FS with very large driving wheels.

Of course without being able to ask the man himself we can never know the facts and wartime throws up all sorts of unlikely circumstances. I'd suggest, though, that this is a confusion of more than one story about his career.

Finally, if he did work munitions trains during the war then I think everyone on here would take off their hat to him. If you're interested, read about the Soham explosion to get an idea of how dangerous that work could be even without enemy involvement.

The full name of the driver would be helpful and should be traceable.

The LNER's investment in the largest wide firebox loco fleet in the UK paid off significantly with the onset of war. These classes were operated as a group, on schedules to make use of their power potential for maximum load, with speed reductions to minimise track wear, and frequently on freight because that needed to be moved, while the passenger services the pacifics were primarily built for were much reduced, and intended for essential travel. Practical railway operation will have prevented the use of a heavy loco on much of the East Anglian part of the network, but this doesn't preclude a pacific working the train from a location such as Thorpe Park on the main lines, and handing over to a lighter loco at an exchange point for the run to destination.

'Flying Scotsman' may well have been used as a 'shorthand' for non-railway folk, for what was actually a Gresley A1 or A3 pacific, this being the best known to the public of this group of pacifics? (The names are meaningless in identifying a particular steam loco from an engineering standpoint: they were rebuilt regularly in works overhauls, and after the number of cycles of this between 1923 and 1939 the majority of the machine would contain little of the original metal that came out of the works as a loco bearing those nameplates. Unromantic, but that's the truth.)