Great Northern by O.S. Nock

Pre-Grouping Railway Scene

No 2

The Great Northern

EDITED BY O. S. NOCK

For one halcyon epoch in the 19th century the Great Northern was the fastest line in Britain, and at that time such an honour meant also the championship of the world. All that was long before the days of intensive public relations campaigns, and it is hard to imagine the'canny,retiring Scottish locomotive superintendent acting as a publicity agent. Yet so he did. His bogie eight-foot single express engine, although a small proportion of the total stud,caught popular fancy to an extent unparalleled by any other contemporary design  . Advertising techniques were developing rapidly when the first of the large boilered Ivatt Atlantics appeared in 1902. Those responsible for the art on the GR were evidently much impressed by the size of the boiler, because in posters it seemed to grow until it reached a diameter of something around 10ft, causing a railway littérateur of the day to remark:

'No 251, bigger-boilered than ever, leers at us from every hoarding'! To the connoisseurs, however, there were many other interesting and worthy locomotive classes on the GR apart from the Stirling eight-footers and the Ivatt Atlantics, and from the Rixon Bucknall's remarkable collection the distinguished railway author, O. S. Nock, has selected photographs that vividly reflect the extent and variety of the stock in pre-Grouping years.

Cover: /vatt 4-4-2 No 949 heads an evening London-Kings Cross-Sheffield and Manchester express between the outer London suburbs of Hadley Wood and Potters Bar.

/ Painting by George Heiron