In the September 1982 issue of The Railway Magazine, D. L. A. Smith recalled playing truant in September 1935 to see the LNER’s new “Silver Jubilee” train on its Press Run. His account records the appearance of Silver Link, the passing of the train at Oakleigh Park and the later history of the “Silver Jubilee”.
IT is said the memories of one’s youth become bathed in perpetual summers. However that might be, September’s end in 1935 was fine and dry. I remember it well.
That month we had moved up into the Third Form at school. The term would have been about three weeks old, and everybody still settling down to the routines of a new school year. The chap at the desk next to mine was an early-day train spotter: in those pre-“ABC” times, when boys hung over embankment fences for the sake of simply watching trains go by, Giles—we called him Gillis—noted numbers, visited sheds, studied The Railway Magazine, and generally kept a systematic eye on the LNER locomotive stock. Where he compiled meticulous, finely pencilled notebooks, I, like other thirteen-year olds who watched trains at all, viewed the High Barnet branch “N1”s and “N2”s—we called them “tanks”, I regret to report—and the apple-green Atlantics and Pacifics on the main line for the merely aesthetic joy of it.
From the history of steam through to 21st century rail transport news, we have titles that cater for all rail enthusiasts. Covering diesels, modelling, steam and modern railways, check out our range of magazines and fantastic subscription offers.
The plan to see the Press Run
It was for this reason that the suggestion to play truant came from Gillis, not me. He was a serious-minded boy, to whom “cutting school” would certainly not occur in the normal event. But Gillis knew, as I didn’t, that on September 27 there was to be a Press Run of a new LNER train: not just an addition to the list of named trains, but a brand new engine heading brand new coaching stock.
This in our view was not before time, incidentally. There had been much trimming of train times, both at home and abroad. The Americans and the Germans had each produced streamlined locomotives—(“streamlined”) being an oft-applied and sometimes misapplied word of the day. Even the staid GWR was in the news with the “Cheltenham Flyer”. We considered the Great Western to have over-reached itself in the absurd things it had done to King Henry VII, but it was surely the turn of the LNER to re-assert its right to own the racehorses of the railways.
In that year of grace 1935 then, the new express was to be titled “Silver Jubilee” and it was to have its inaugural run on Monday, September 30: on from Newcastle at 10 a.m., return down out of Kings Cross at 5.30 p.m. But Gillis knew about the coming Friday Press Run to Grantham, and he knew when it was to leave Kings Cross: 2.25 in the afternoon. It would be through Oakleigh Park long before school ended. To see it, we would have to cut afternoon classes. Chalky the Headmaster was not trains orientated and would not appreciate the super abnormality of the event, so we thought it better not to inform him of it.
There were certain preparatory moves necessary, concerned with moving bicycles from the shed to a convenient place in the School Field hedge. At the finish of second period after lunch, ten minutes to two, Gillis and I slipped out, did a passable Red Indian crawl round the School Field, got our bicycles through the thin bit of hedge, and were away. Up Finchley High Road to Whetstone, eastwards to the main-line about 300 yards north of Barnet Tunnel between New Southgate and Oakleigh Park: on to a little footbridge, where other initiates had already gathered . . . .
The northern portal of the tunnel was its usual sooty self. The shallow cutting, spanned by the footbridge on which we stood, tended to cosset and preserve the relish which was South Yorkshire coal and Great Northern steam. Faint striations of both escaped reluctantly from the tunnel roof. An up train may have passed—I can’t remember.
Gillis had a wrist watch. He told me that a good average express time out of Kings Cross to passing Oakleigh Park would be twelve or thirteen minutes. So we had to wait until between 2.37 and 2.38. Minutes ahead of that schedule—as it turned out, at 2.34½—a faint and muffled rumble from within the tunnel set the blood tingling. The rumble grew rapidly to a roar, in turn resolving to a beat, three notes to the bar but in tempo very, very quick indeed, more like a modulated roar, which we knew to herald a Gresley engine at work and at speed.
Silver Link appears
The tunnel mouth spurted its premonitory gust of steam; coincidentally there also issued not the shrill cry of an LNER whistle, but a wonderous organ note. What followed was unforgettable. Not apple green and varnished teak, but silver and grey! Not a circular smokebox carrying a headboard arc, but a vast streamlined wedge of a front end! The six-foot Gresley boiler had disappeared beneath a smooth, pale grey outer casing. Even the whirling Walschaerts gear was nearly hidden by valancing in the shape of an aerofoil. Because of the valances there were no wheel splashers—and so nowhere conventional to put the nameplates. This two-tone grey phenomenon had its name lettered on its streamlined boiler casing. And that name itself, clearly not another in the line of Gresley racehorses, was also intriguing: Silver Link. The gaps between engine and tender, and along the train between coaches, were missing, being closed by flexible sheeting.
There was little enough time for all these images to register. As I found out later, Silver Link was accelerating her train up the 1 in 200 all the way to the Potters Bar crest, such that when we saw her the speed was around 71 m.p.h. and still increasing. In other words, with the train covering track at 104 feet per second, we had eight seconds or so before it was thundering beneath our feet and away to the North. As we turned to watch her go, we saw that her brake vestibule bore the legend “The Silver Jubilee” in bold LNER sans-serif lettering.
The roar of the exhaust diminished rapidly. Then so too did the irregular clatter of the articulated stock over the rail joints. The “Silver Jubilee” leant into the northbound curve, and was gone.
On our footbridge there was a telling moment of silence: the respectful hush at the close of a great performance. Then everybody compared impressions at once. “Did you see the chimney? It had no flange”. “She must have been doing a hundred!” “2509, Silver Link—what does Silver Link mean?” “It was a Pacific, wasn’t it?” “Wow!”
Gillis and I stayed to watch the East Coast Main Line traffic for a while, in silence. It was all very much of an anti-climax. A train of Bogie Bricks coasting into London; a Mogul plucking a long line of empty coal wagons up the Northern Heights, which we usually would have counted, but now did not. The nearly empty mid-afternoon Quadart sets on suburban duty; the much fuller fasts; a Cambridge Buffet Car Express; all were observed but dispassionately so. Eventually we cycled our separate ways home.
The Press Run from inside
A personal account of the Press Run “from inside” appeared two months later in The Railway Magazine for November, 1935, written by Cecil J. Allen. It was from interpolation of his timings and speeds that we worked out the 71 m.p.h. of the “Silver Jubilee” at the time we saw her. Many years later, in his autobiography, “Two Million Miles of Train Travel”, Cecil J. Allen gave fuller story of that Press Run.
Had we but known it, among much LNER and other top-brass aboard the train, there was Nigel Gresley himself, armed as C. J. Allen put it “with the enormous chronograph he used for personal timings”. There was also the matter of the side control of the new coaching stock, which for that first run turned out to be insufficient for comfort. It was suitably increased over the weekend in time for the first public run; and urgent attention was given to the super-elevation and transition of certain curves on the East Coast Main Line. Signalling and braking had also to be re-considered, for the “Jubilee” was to set new standards—to be followed by the “Coronation” and the “West Riding Limited”, as well as re-timings of other expresses—for the speeding-up of the LNER in its ultimate heyday.
The progress of Silver Link
The progress of Silver Link and her train on the Press Run is a matter of history: up to nearly 90 m.p.h. through Hatfield, the “ton” first reached at Milepost 30 and sustained until Milepost 55, the two maxima of 112½ m.p.h., the 43 miles covered at an average speed of 100 m.p.h. History too is the success of the “Silver Jubilee” both as a high-speed train and as a revenue earner. Her booked average speed each way for the 232·3 miles between Kings Cross and Darlington was 70·4 m.p.h., regularly achieved or exceeded. Up to the end of her career in September 1939, the train had run 540,000 miles and was estimated to have earned about 62½p (12s/6d) per mile in revenue.
After the weekend we went into school on Monday morning expecting the worst from the Heavy Hand. However, nothing happened. By the end of the day we knew we were safe. I often again watched the LNER main-line scene, but nothing left quite the impression of the sight of Silver Link and her train.
Returning more than 45 years later
Very recently, more than 45 years after that introduction to the Gresley “A4”, I re-visited the scene. The narrow path down to the footbridge hid just as coyly between the houses, led equally as certainly to the East Coast Main Line. The footbridge itself, rebuilt at a higher elevation to give adequate clearance for the 25kV catenaries above the tracks, was no longer in Great Northern lattice work, but of welded sheet steel. A sad sign of the times was that the sides of the bridge had been built up to extra height immediately above the running lines—presumably to discourage the (literal) dropping of bricks or worse.
The tunnel mouths no longer breathed steam and coal smoke. So immaculate were the bores that the light from their far ends, 600 yards to the south, could be seen. The Quadarts and the “N2”s hauling them were long since gone: Kings Cross suburban was represented by aseptic blue e.m.u.s, speeding along without visible or audible effort. An up freight was hauled by a diesel-electric locomotive of similar blandness and blueness. Its train of identical hopper waggons carrying gravel was “fitted”, and so lacked a brake van (such a thing still suggests to this observer a train which has become divided and hence something which someone should tell the driver about).
Main-line express traffic continues to thunder up and down the centre tracks, mostly in the shape of Inter-City 125s—uniform, fast, available, relatively efficient, and yet so essentially faceless. Their progenitor, the “Silver Jubilee”, the first of the HSTs, was much more exciting.
The original story appeared in The Railway Magazine and is accessible in the online archive, for Railway Magazine subscribers. Click HERE to subscribe, save and access!
