How Mallard inspired a rock band

Hi, my name is Sam and I handle the social media channels for the museum. As we prepare for Mallard 75 celebrations, I’ve started to look at the many ways Mallard, the world’s fastest steam loco, has inspired people;  from appearing on pub signs to having new scientific discoveries named after it. Then, through a fan’s tweet, I came across English Prog Rock band Big Big Train. They were so inspired by this beautiful loco, on a visit to our museum no less!, that they wrote a song titled ‘East Coast Racer’. I contacted them to find out more and band-member Greg kindly offered to write a guest blog. So without further ado please find below ‘Big Big Train’ telling you how ‘Mallard inspired a rock band’.

Big Big Train have released eight albums including the critically acclaimed The Underfall Yard (2009) and the two part double album English Electric (2012/2013).

“I play bass and write songs for a progressive rock band called Big Big Train. We have recently released an album which features a track about Mallard. The song is called East Coast Racer and tells the story of Mallard and of the people who designed, made, fired and drove her.

We like to tell true-life stories with our songs and we look for interesting historical tales which we can set to music. A few years ago I paid my first visit to the National Railway Museum.  The sight of Mallard stopped me in my tracks and I knew that I wanted to write a song about her. Whilst Mallard was made for speed the designers created something of extraordinary beauty and, in the song, I wanted to capture the connection between the company of people who worked on the engine and the extraordinary machine they created.

It is a tale with a wonderful list of main characters; designer Sir Nigel Gresley, his assistant Oliver Bulleid, fireman Tommy Bray and driver Joe Duddington. Alongside those with starring roles was a community of engineers and railwaymen who all played a part.

The epic story of Mallard deserves an epic soundtrack and East Coast Racer is a long piece of music, written in true progressive-rock style. The song begins with the construction of Mallard where we have sought to create a sense of the sounds of the workshops, and ends with Mallard’s record breaking run where we used a string quartet and brass band to help convey the speed of the train running down Stoke Bank.”

Greg Spawton,

Big Big Train

East Coast Racer can be heard on the museum’s (or Big Big Train) Soundcloud page below or you can buy it here

Station Stories: Spring Breaks and Daytrips

As part of the Station Hall redevelopment, I have been working on the Station Stories project, collating the railway memories that the public have submitted. People sent us emails, letters, and lots of story forms and we have also been gathering stories out and about. As the project comes to a close, we have had contact with almost 500 individuals, run outreach sessions with over 400 adults, and generated over 700 stories.

It’s been lovely reading everyone’s anecdotes and recollections and I’ve chosen just a few to share with you here. I thought I’d pick stories about Spring breaks and daytrips. Lots of people have shared with us their memories about going on holiday by rail and taking trips to the beach, including trying to be the first to spot the sea from the train!

I used to come to Scarborough as a child, just for the day at Easter. It was always Easter that we went, when you’d got your new clothes, your new sandals and your new dress. You got on at York, and everybody got on the Scarborough specials. Then, around 5 or 6 o’clock, everybody was going back. There was a long seat at the station and everybody would crowd onto that seat to wait for the train. It was packed on the train, everybody wanted to look out of the window and you got soot in your eyes from the smoke.

A few people have shared their memories of waiting on the platform seat at Scarborough, which is said to be the longest at a train station.

We frequently caught the train from Camborne to Hayle and walked a good mile and a half to the ‘three miles of golden sand’, which we would share with a few other intrepid families. The trains we caught in each direction for this very short journey of about 15 minutes were mostly long distance trains. I am afraid some of the travellers who joined the train later in its journey must have found considerable quantities of sand and occasional shells dropped from plastic buckets on the floor of their compartments!

I’ve enjoyed reading tales about the community and social life on the railways, including stories about workers’ outings. In this story, the son of a railwayman recollects a trip to the East Coast. 

Engine men tended to be members of St Clements working men’s club. Each year the club organised a children’s trip to Scarborough, always by train. I distinctly remember one year when the club treasurer, himself a driver, organised the kids to queue up alongside the cab of the Class B16 on Scarborough station while he distributed the 2/- piece spending money to each of us from the footplate. Happy days!

The outside of Scarborough station in 1958.

As well as travelling on holiday by train, some of you also remember staying in old station buildings or railway carriages.

When I was 11 we took a holiday to Akeld Station in Northumberland, which had been turned into a holiday cottage. One goods train a day still passed through. The Station Master was very friendly and allowed us to operate the signals. Oh the thrill! I can still remember it.

A signalman operating the levers in a British Railways signal box.

My loveliest memory of a railway station is of Ravenscar in 1964. We stayed in a railway carriage at the end of the platform. We went on the train every day to Scarborough, Whitby, or Bridlington. The children thought it was wonderful. The downside was that the same week we were there the papers had the news that Dr Beeching was putting an end to this beautiful line that ran all the way down the East Coast but we all have wonderful memories of a lovely holiday.

LNER poster showing the East Coast near Whitby.

All these stories and the many others that we have collected are soon going to be available for the public to read at Search Engine.

King’s Cross redevelopment wins heritage award

The redevelopment of Kings Cross Station has been awarded an EU Prize for Cultural Heritage in the area of conservation.

The work on Lewis Cubitt’s 1852 Grade 1 listed station built for the Great Northern Railway has transformed the way passengers see and use the station. The project, begun in 2007, has seen the construction of a new passenger concourse including an impressive new roof and improvements to passenger facilities. The final phase, due for completion in August 2013, will involve the removal of the front canopy in order to reveal Cubitt’s original station façade for the first time in 150 years. (see images of the development on the Network Rail website).

Here are a few images of the station façade from the National Railway Museum collection.

Watercolour, Arrival of Queen Victoria at King’s Cross Station, by an unknown artist, possibly Lewis Cubitt, the station’s architect, about 1852

King’s Cross Station, about 1927

Rebuilding the forecourt of London’s King’s Cross station, 26 January 1973

Kings Cross station frontage, 2007.

The awards jury described the transformation of the formerly ‘depressing’ building as ‘both welcome and essential’ calling the project ‘inspiring’. They were impressed by the reuse of areas such as the former Parcels Office (as a pub/restaurant) and reinstatement of the Booking Hall but in particular “were uplifted by the exhilarating curves of the western concourse.” (http://www.europanostra.org/awards/108/).

The European Heritage Awards are overseen by the European Union and Europa Nostra and an awards ceremony for the winners will take place in Athens on 16 June. 15 prizes have been awarded in the conservation category, also including work on Railway bridges in the Langstraat Region, from ‘s-Hertogenbosch to Lage Zwaluwe, THE NETHERLANDS. Overall 200 projects were nominated in four categories, with six to be nominated as grand prix winners at the awards ceremony, with a further public choice award. For further information about the prize and other winners see http://www.europanostra.org/laureates-2013/.

Picture(s) of the week: a special day for the Shildon Works Band

Photographic volunteer Anne McLean selects her favourite photos from our collection. There are 1000s more photos to browse – all free for personal use under a Creative Commons license – on our main photos page.

8 November 1949 was a proud day for the Shildon Works Band. They were on their way to London to play in the Lord Mayor’s parade, and these photographs show them about to board the train at Darlington for their journey south.

I think the photographs capture the excitement of the occasion. The band’s uniforms are immaculate, their shoes beautifully polished, and their brass instruments are gleaming. The steam engine stands ready to depart.

Before setting off, they pose for photographs with the engine driver and a junior member of the band. In the first two photographs, the little boy looks rather unsure, but in the third picture he looks thrilled to be standing on the footplate of the locomotive.

In this picture the band are shown at the end of their journey, marching through the wet streets of London in the Lord Mayor’s parade.

Station Hall: the finishing touches

Since my last post, when we made real inroads into the installation work in Station Hall, we’ve been focusing on getting the finishing touches just right.

Our Conservation team have been installing collection items throughout Station Hall. Here they’re adding some railway maps to the Concourse wall.

They also installed some station totems from our collection.

We’ve also installed graphics throughout the space. Here is our ‘poster cloud’ on the entrance railings to Station Hall. Choosing just 6 posters from our collection of over 10,000 was no mean feat.

The reverse of the poster cloud showcases some of the images from our collection, along with some of the great stories we collected as part of our Station Stories project.

We’ve also opened up our Mark II carriage so that visitors can get in and enjoy watching a film in the carriage.

We’ve also been trialling some steam effects, with more tests to do in the coming weeks.

But my favourite image of the last few weeks has to be this one – I think it shows just how far we’ve come in redeveloping Station Hall, and transforming it into an atmospheric space.

Bringing the Prototype HST back to life

January 2012, and the prototype High Speed Train power car is getting closer and closer to roaring back into life thanks to the hard work of the 125 Group, the benevolent staff of East Midlands Trains at their Neville Hill depot, and the fact that the restoration is taking place under cover (!).

With the Paxman diesel engine now installed and ready to go, the job now is to complete a massive rewiring programme, as well as other essential jobs that mean the locomotive can go for testing.

In this picture above, Tony Shaw from the 125 Group rewires the electrical cubicle, the ‘brains’ of the machine. New wiring was deemed essential, in the same way as a steam loco restoration always needs new boiler tubes. Just as with steam there are parts from other machines helping bring the HST back to life, in this case from a Class 56, including the short circuiter (designed to save the traction motors if there is an earth fault).

As ever with restorations, ‘simple’ jobs have proved anything but – even cleaning, repairing and repainting the battery boxes took two days.

Other jobs successfully tackled include getting the Cardan shaft lengthened to fit the production engine that’s in it now.

There have also been some ‘homework’ projects – often a part of the railway preservation world, but seldom like this. Above, Gary Heelas from the group shows a circuit board, one of a number he put together at home to keep the restoration moving along.

The ongoing work has also given those helping a rare glimpse into the industrial design of forty years ago, showing that it wasn’t all about ‘surface styling’. Above, the locomotives rectifiers are in an unusual arrangement that is almost certainly unique in British locomotives.

The outside ‘look’ of the final HSTs (aka ‘Flying Bananas’) was of course courtesy of leading industrial designer Kenneth Grange (also responsible for designs like the Kenwood food mixer and the Adshel bus shelter). Grange’s ‘look’ and the good engineering it covers has ensured that the HST remains a style icon, and will remain on the rails for some time to come thanks to the recent programme of refurbishing these units and replacing the engines.

Just how much anyone who uses an InterCity train owes to this most important design is easy to forget. But as Grange himself once said, in an interview on the BBC:

There wasn’t a sign of modernism in Paddington station (when the HST’s were introduced in 1976). So I think the workforce – let alone the passengers – was mightily affected. This was a real symbol of hope for the future – I believe that most fervently.
Porters, guards, everybody were themselves buying little badges of this train.

Thanks to the 125 Group we will shortly be able to hear again the sound of a Paxman in full cry, something we now know to have been the herald of a bright future for Britain’s railways.

Meanwhile, if you want to pore over a sectioned Paxman out in the open for the first time, visit the Anson Engine Museum at Poynton, where the sectioned engine removed from the HST Prototype is now on loan.

Above, the sectioned Paxman Valenta engine at Neville Hill depot prior to being moved to Poynton.

Picture of the week: cleaning the signals

It’s the turn of Belinda Morris, our Interpretation Manager, to choose a photo from our 4000-strong online collection:

I remember coming across this image when I researched my first exhibition at the museum. What I love about it is the sense of scale it portrays – that the signals are lifesize. I will also confess to wanting the lens cleaner to strike a pose so he looks like a third signal with his arm out in front. I like to think he did that before the serious shot was taken.

This photo is from our Euston collection – check out the 698 other photos from the collection that we have online.