The Flying Scotsman Story, National Railway Museum, York
To the National Railway Museum (NRM) at York to attend the opening of its exhibition on the Flying Scotsman. In homage, we go by rail for, as the American-born writer Nathaniel Hawthorne reminds us, 'these railroads… they give us wings… they spiritualise travel'.
The concept of the Flying Scotsman is complicated. The name is simultaneously a route, a train and an engine. The service began in 1862, over a route nearly 400 miles long between Edinburgh Waverley and London King's Cross. It carried the graceless name of the Special Scotch Express, a title unchanged until 1924.
Then the name Flying Scotsman emerged and a new express locomotive was built and displayed at the British Empire Exhibition. A love affair with the British public began, a passion that has survived at least five liveries and eight changes of number.
When in 1955 British Rail abandoned steam traction the locomotive passed into private ownership. For nearly half a century, despite the lavish attention of successive lovers, she proved a fickle and expensive mistress.
In 2004 the Flying Scotsman was saved from further ignominy and bought for the nation with donations from the public, private sponsors and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
She now rests in peace, or rather in pieces, at the NRM. Completely dismantled and overhauled, she will hopefully be back hauling trains by late 2007. The museum, with some ingenuity, has found space within its secular cathedral to build and mount an enthralling exhibition that is more than a monument to massive technology.
In a tightly designed gallery that overlooks the workshops, a narrative that successfully blends mechanical and social history is told with a commendable mix of scholarship and wit.
Transport museums have very differing congregations; these range from professional and amateur aficionados, besuited and anoraked, who can talk for hours - and frequently do - about the minutiae of sprockets and schedules.
But there are far more visitors, not least family groups, who come to marvel and to learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than the wretched Reverend Awdry, the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, ever dreamed of.
The needs of these different audiences are nicely judged. There is a wealth of information and sensation available at the touch of a screen or the opening of a locker. Reminiscence is piled on reminiscence. People are at the very centre of the show, whether owners, engineers, passengers or enthusiasts.
It's hard to judge whether those who travelled or those who once made that travel possible are the prouder. And wouldn't it be good if the present holders of rail franchises started once more to regard and refer to us as passengers rather than as customers or consumers?
It is a difficult art, building an exhibition without a heart. At York, the subject - the locomotive itself - will always be elsewhere. But the project succeeds, because it extols the soul of travel. Whether by fortune or design the exhibition is enhanced by its setting, surrounded as it is by the public storage area of artefacts, which include station nameplates, timetables, boardroom furniture, waiting room stained glass and a huge table-top set of track and engines used for the instruction of trainee signallers.
I was especially taken with a modern glass museum cabinet containing a delectable collection of chamber pots bearing the arms of railway hotels. The prosaic, perhaps po-faced, modern label instructs 'empty before moving'.
The museum is full and moving, but also eclectic and exciting. I was pleased to be bombarded with sensations and information about the Flying Scotsman but I would hate the same approach to be used for the Mallard locomotive. She stands sleek and seductive, demanding adoration. However surreptiously, you have to stroke the Mallard's flanks.
The Flying Scotsman is more like the ancient aunt whose genealogy you seek to trace. Being as interested in words as artefacts I posed one question that, for all the scholarship in York, remains unresolved.
Where does the name Flying Scotsman come from? Who coined one of the most successful brand names of all time? Nobody seems to know. When it emerged in the 1920s was it merely acknowledging what was already current in popular use? Or was it perhaps a folk memory of stagecoaches, the fliers that once plied the route?
In the 1830s the pioneering engineers chose the steam horse as their animal of comparison. But the social commentators of that time were already ornithologically inclined. 'It is really flying… frightful... it gave me a headache,' opined Thomas Creevy after travelling at 23 miles per hour. For the actress Fanny Kemble the experience was orgasmic: 'When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful.'
Even the usually sombre Thomas Carlyle waxed poetical: 'To whirl… as if some steam night-bird had flung you on its back, and was sweeping through unknown space with you.' While some poets were prosaic, (Alfred Tennyson, though an observer at Rainhill, thought that trains ran in grooves), other commentators found thrilling similes.
I'm especially fond of the observation of William Howitt in 1842. He wrote of coal hauling 'the railway; it glides like a black swan into its native lake'. Any visitor to the NRM will be similarly enlightened, enthralled and excited.
GNER, which now holds the franchise, has emblazoned on the side of every carriage the armorial bearings of Scotland and England and the legend - the route of the Flying Scotsman. On the day we travelled it seemed to be celebrating heritage by replicating the original ten and a half hour timetable.
At Newcastle some southbound trains were more than an hour late, disabled toilets and seat reservations were advertised as 'unavilable' (sic), and the train, when it came, was creaky with dirty carpets and torn dusty upholstery. The return journey was equally haphazard. Not so much Flying Scotsman, more Flying Dutchman. Believe it or not, GNER, museums have much to teach you.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost: £700,000 Main funders: Yorkshire Forward, Heritage Lottery Fund
Project director: Stephen Richards
Exhibition curation and content development: NRM
Project management: Fraser Randall
Exhibition design: Land Design Studio
Graphic design: Thomas Matthews
Exhibition fit-out: Scena Projects
AV and multimedia design: Studio Simple and NRM
AV and multimedia hardware: Electrosonic
Lighting design: David Atkinson Lighting Design
Planning supervisor: Bowman Riley
To the National Railway Museum (NRM) at York to attend the opening of its exhibition on the Flying Scotsman. In homage, we go by rail for, as the American-born writer Nathaniel Hawthorne reminds us, 'these railroads… they give us wings… they spiritualise travel'.
The concept of the Flying Scotsman is complicated. The name is simultaneously a route, a train and an engine. The service began in 1862, over a route nearly 400 miles long between Edinburgh Waverley and London King's Cross. It carried the graceless name of the Special Scotch Express, a title unchanged until 1924.
Then the name Flying Scotsman emerged and a new express locomotive was built and displayed at the British Empire Exhibition. A love affair with the British public began, a passion that has survived at least five liveries and eight changes of number.
When in 1955 British Rail abandoned steam traction the locomotive passed into private ownership. For nearly half a century, despite the lavish attention of successive lovers, she proved a fickle and expensive mistress.
In 2004 the Flying Scotsman was saved from further ignominy and bought for the nation with donations from the public, private sponsors and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
She now rests in peace, or rather in pieces, at the NRM. Completely dismantled and overhauled, she will hopefully be back hauling trains by late 2007. The museum, with some ingenuity, has found space within its secular cathedral to build and mount an enthralling exhibition that is more than a monument to massive technology.
In a tightly designed gallery that overlooks the workshops, a narrative that successfully blends mechanical and social history is told with a commendable mix of scholarship and wit.
Transport museums have very differing congregations; these range from professional and amateur aficionados, besuited and anoraked, who can talk for hours - and frequently do - about the minutiae of sprockets and schedules.
But there are far more visitors, not least family groups, who come to marvel and to learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than the wretched Reverend Awdry, the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, ever dreamed of.
The needs of these different audiences are nicely judged. There is a wealth of information and sensation available at the touch of a screen or the opening of a locker. Reminiscence is piled on reminiscence. People are at the very centre of the show, whether owners, engineers, passengers or enthusiasts.
It's hard to judge whether those who travelled or those who once made that travel possible are the prouder. And wouldn't it be good if the present holders of rail franchises started once more to regard and refer to us as passengers rather than as customers or consumers?
It is a difficult art, building an exhibition without a heart. At York, the subject - the locomotive itself - will always be elsewhere. But the project succeeds, because it extols the soul of travel. Whether by fortune or design the exhibition is enhanced by its setting, surrounded as it is by the public storage area of artefacts, which include station nameplates, timetables, boardroom furniture, waiting room stained glass and a huge table-top set of track and engines used for the instruction of trainee signallers.
I was especially taken with a modern glass museum cabinet containing a delectable collection of chamber pots bearing the arms of railway hotels. The prosaic, perhaps po-faced, modern label instructs 'empty before moving'.
The museum is full and moving, but also eclectic and exciting. I was pleased to be bombarded with sensations and information about the Flying Scotsman but I would hate the same approach to be used for the Mallard locomotive. She stands sleek and seductive, demanding adoration. However surreptiously, you have to stroke the Mallard's flanks.
The Flying Scotsman is more like the ancient aunt whose genealogy you seek to trace. Being as interested in words as artefacts I posed one question that, for all the scholarship in York, remains unresolved.
Where does the name Flying Scotsman come from? Who coined one of the most successful brand names of all time? Nobody seems to know. When it emerged in the 1920s was it merely acknowledging what was already current in popular use? Or was it perhaps a folk memory of stagecoaches, the fliers that once plied the route?
In the 1830s the pioneering engineers chose the steam horse as their animal of comparison. But the social commentators of that time were already ornithologically inclined. 'It is really flying… frightful... it gave me a headache,' opined Thomas Creevy after travelling at 23 miles per hour. For the actress Fanny Kemble the experience was orgasmic: 'When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful.'
Even the usually sombre Thomas Carlyle waxed poetical: 'To whirl… as if some steam night-bird had flung you on its back, and was sweeping through unknown space with you.' While some poets were prosaic, (Alfred Tennyson, though an observer at Rainhill, thought that trains ran in grooves), other commentators found thrilling similes.
I'm especially fond of the observation of William Howitt in 1842. He wrote of coal hauling 'the railway; it glides like a black swan into its native lake'. Any visitor to the NRM will be similarly enlightened, enthralled and excited.
GNER, which now holds the franchise, has emblazoned on the side of every carriage the armorial bearings of Scotland and England and the legend - the route of the Flying Scotsman. On the day we travelled it seemed to be celebrating heritage by replicating the original ten and a half hour timetable.
At Newcastle some southbound trains were more than an hour late, disabled toilets and seat reservations were advertised as 'unavilable' (sic), and the train, when it came, was creaky with dirty carpets and torn dusty upholstery. The return journey was equally haphazard. Not so much Flying Scotsman, more Flying Dutchman. Believe it or not, GNER, museums have much to teach you.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost: £700,000 Main funders: Yorkshire Forward, Heritage Lottery Fund
Project director: Stephen Richards
Exhibition curation and content development: NRM
Project management: Fraser Randall
Exhibition design: Land Design Studio
Graphic design: Thomas Matthews
Exhibition fit-out: Scena Projects
AV and multimedia design: Studio Simple and NRM
AV and multimedia hardware: Electrosonic
Lighting design: David Atkinson Lighting Design
Planning supervisor: Bowman Riley
