Flying Scotsman

The thing is Flying Scotsman is too popular with the general public to end up as just a museum piece. The amount of money it brings in for heritage lines is insane, love the loco or hate it having it run does help boost up the heritage sector more then it can stuck in NRM forever. I hope it will always continue to run on heritage lines but mainline as much as I would love to see it out there, perhaps it's had its time.

Seeing it as 4472 again in apple green tho needs to happen again, miss that livery.

 

Daft idea, I think. Returning it to "as built" condition would effectively remove most of its history. How a historical object ends up is just as interesting as how it started.

In preservation it has run as 4472 (single chimney, LNER livery), and as 60103 (double chimney, smoke deflectors, BR livery). As I've said here before I would advocate it switching between these two identities at each successive overhaul. Imagine the excitement at each unveiling

 

Interested to know if there is significant difference between registering Scotsman as a self powered vehicle or as a towed vehicle ( in effect a van). As the latter can a lot of the electronics be removed ?
Even if only powering herself on heritage lines the consensus is that being towed in light steam is less damaging than being loaded on and off of road vehicles...
Apple green , polished smokebox bands, no deflectors for me. Chimney ? in this day an age a single Lempor or Kyllchap can be designed to give a sharp enough blast to avoid the need for deflectors and still give better performance than the original single...

 

Lets just enjoy this engine whether it be the mainline or preserved lines and maybe give the NRM a bit of credit for keeping her in steam. She's a wonderful loco and a great ambassador for steam and right now that's exactly what steam needs.

 

What about for the NRM?

 

Regarding Apple Green. Even apples don't look good in it. Horrible colour.

 

Well, there's a statement set to put the cat among the pigeons.

 

Clearly just trolling. We all know there’s no finer livery

 

It’s had ten years of rail tours.

Ten years of merchandise sales.

Ten years of visits across the country where preserved railways have lined up as it undoubtedly fills their coffers.

It’s been on the royal train, it’s done a slew of photo charters, it’s been a real ambassador for the NRM and railway preservation.

Anyone who calls it the “flying money pit” or similar is just notifying the rest of us that they really don’t understand it.

Luckily some of us do accounts for a living in various forms and we know it has done a great job for the NRM and then some.

A super return on investment in all the ways you can measure in numbers and a lot in ways you couldn’t.

The livery debate and form sadly is probably over: it was said to be apple green in this ticket but I suspect it won’t now, which is a shame.

When it does actually go out of ticket, there is an opportunity there for a repaint and chimney change to raise funds for its next ticket, if the money isn’t already allocated (and tbh if I were the NRM I’d already be having discussions about how we fund that for the future).

The general public love it, and rightly so. Manage it well, and they will come.

It does our industry a huge favour being in steam more than not.

End thereof.

 

What!? 180 psi boiler and short-travel valves?

 

Agreed. I truly believe the heritage industry needs Flying Scotsman, heritage railways in particular.

 

Them too, they also do very well out of Scotsman.

 

Apart from LNWR lined black, Malachite Green, GWR Green, Midland Red, S&D blue... And that's just the steam liveries

 

The mechanical condition in which it achieved the first authenticated 100mph run, as opposed to some GWR fantasy

 

Yep, and it's only a matter of time before some twerp of a trespasser gets turned into hamburger.

And if we're going to have paint froth let it next be BR Express Passenger Blue - or LNER Green with BRITISH RAILWAYS on the tender.

 

Not trolling at all. I've lived all my life in the former North-Eastern Region, all the A3s I saw in service were in BR Green, or, more likely, its grime-covered equivalent. The exception was Flying Scotsman, which I first saw in early May 1964, by which time it had been what I called even then, 'Peglarised' into a hybrid single chimney A3, and turned out in Apple Green to clearly differentiate it from its still-working sisters and to follow the prevailing fashion of painting stuff in Pre-BR livery. It never carried the number 4472 as an A3, being converted in early 1947, a year after it became 502/103, although it was Apple Green at the time, being repainted from Black at the time of its conversion from A1. I didn't like that insipid watery green shade in 1964, and I don't to this day.

 

You must be referring to that marvelous green livery that was worn by Mr Stroudley's handsome locomotives in the century before last

Peter

 

Gateshead Green?

 

That's the one. I'd been trainspotting for about 6 months before I even realised that V2s were green. That was only after a 'cleanish' one pulled up at the platform at Newcastle and I saw the orange and black lining through the 'mud'. I think that prior to that, I'd just assumed they were black, like the B1s and other non-Pacifics.