<img src="https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&amp;c2=6035250&amp;cv=2.0&amp;cj=1&amp;cs_ucfr=0&amp;comscorekw=Rail+travel%2CHeritage%2CTransport%2CTravel%2CUK+news"> Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

New steam locomotive unveiled: £3m Tornado unleashed 40 years after age of steam

This article is more than 15 years old
After 18 years of fundraising, designing and engineering, trust unveils its locomotive

"Please send Tornado to the rescue." My text message wings its way through the electronic ether from south of Grantham - where my two-mile-a-minute National Express electric has been reduced to a 20mph crawl due to faults with the overhead lines - to Darlington where, yesterday, Britain's very latest main line railway locomotive was turning its wheels for the first time in public.

Tornado might well have been able to help. For this 160-tonne, 3,000hp locomotive capable of 100mph is powered not by a fickle supply of electricity but by West Midlands coal, Durham water and sweat from a legion of enthusiastic brows. The end product of 18 years of fundraising, revived design skills and tenacious engineering by the members of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, Tornado will soon take to the main lines of Britain, and even of France and Germany, where it will rush trainloads of enthusiasts and others nostalgic for the age of steam at, wherever possible, a steady 90mph.

The astonishing thing about Tornado, a latecoming member of the once 49-strong A1 Pacific class designed for the London and North Eastern Railway just before the nationalisation of Britain's railways in 1948, is that this is the first main line locomotive - steam, diesel or electric - built in this country since the beginning of the 1990s. Shopping-mall, service-economy Britain has very largely abandoned heavy industry and railway locomotives are things seemingly best left to foreigners willing to make large-scale machinery from massive lumps of iron and rolls of steel.

Yesterday, though, it was the trim and perennially stylish Dorothy Mather, 92-year-old widow of Arthur H Peppercorn under whose direction the original A1 Pacifics were designed at Doncaster, 75 miles south of Darlington, who set Tornado's banshee whistle screaming as Graeme Bunker, managing director of Steam Dreams, a steam train touring company and keen engine driver, eased the locomotive away from the shed it had been built in at the old Stockton and Darlington Hopetown Carriage Works. "Absolutely marvellous," said Mather. "Bloody fantastic," said Bunker.

Perhaps the last new British locomotive to be accorded this celebrity status was Evening Star, a class 9F 2-10-0 that rolled out of Swindon works, since closed, in March 1960. Evening Star was the last steam locomotive built for British Railways.

Since the official end of steam on Britain's main line railways 40 years ago this month, steam specials have gradually worked their back on to the lines and into our collective imagination.

"When we first dreamed up the idea of building Tornado in 1990," said David Champion, founding chairman of the A1 trust and formerly with Rothschilds, "we entertained the notion that a whole generation of locospotters, about a third of boys in any school class in the 60s, and a few of their sisters, were grown up and many with decent jobs. All the A1s had been scrapped ... so we reckoned we could tempt mature enthusiasts into shelling out for one."

They did. And, without Lottery funding, the £3m needed to build Tornado was found; in 1949 an original A1 cost £16,000. Naturally, the trust's first patron had to be Dorothy Mather. Her husband, "Pepp", a much-loved figure in railway circles from engine drivers to apprentice engineers, had been an assistant to Sir Nigel Gresley, the man responsible for the design of the world's fastest steam locomotive, the 126mph Mallard, at Doncaster works. Until the early 1960s Mallard sprinted side by side with Peppercorn's A1s at the head of the quickest and heaviest expresses from King's Cross to Edinburgh through Doncaster and Darlington.

Making Tornado was never easy. David Elliott, the project's engineering director, had to track down and scan 1,100 original technical drawings and to ensure that they could be made to make sense to a generation of engineers, machinists and manufacturers for whom steam technology was largely a fresh challenge. The one part of the locomotive that no British company could make was the boiler. In the end the all-welded, high-pressure boiler was made by the German state railway's steam locomotive works at Meiningen.

Will Tornado be as reliable out on the "road" as the Germans might expect her to be? Peter Townend, shed master at King's Cross in the last days of express steam, and now in his 80s, nodded. He had come up from Torquay to see the launch of the locomotive. He said the two finest steam locomotives in his charge were Great Central and Great Eastern, a pair of exceptionally free-running and reliable A1 Pacifics.

"The great thing about Tornado," said Mark Allatt, chairman of the A1 Trust - at 6ft 8in the same same height as the diameter of the Pacific's six driving wheels - "is that the project has involved people from all walks of life, old and new technologies, and it's nurtured tremendous affection, bordering on love." Might the A1 Trust be tempted to build another express steam locomotive? "Watch this space," he says.

Most viewed

Most viewed