The Flying Scotsman: A Rail Romance

For generations, one iconic steam locomotive

has symbolised all that was great about British engineering -

the Flying Scotsman.

Designed by one of Britain's most gifted railway designers

and built by a team of skilled workers,

the Flying Scotsman was a perfect example

of British craftsmanship at its best.

It was a very, very lithe, handsome machine.

It looks like a mechanical racehorse,

and that, of course, is what it was.

In an age when British engineering had so much to be proud of,

the Flying Scotsman was a record-breaker -

the first steam engine to reach 100 miles an hour,

the first to run nonstop between London and Edinburgh,

and the first to star in its own feature film.

It's a magic locomotive.

It's a bit like Apollo, it's a bit like Saturn V.

Such was the love affair with the Flying Scotsman

that even after steam was replaced by more modern technologies,

it defied all expectations and survived.

It was rescued three times by three different millionaires.

The whole idea of buying an express passenger locomotive from British Railways

was something completely new. Nobody had ever done it before.

This is the story of that remarkable adventure,

from Flying Scotsman's first days in the spotlight

to a last-minute escape from the breakers' yard -

a 90-year journey that captured the hearts of a nation.

It's spring 2004,

and the nation's favourite steam engine is coming home

to the National Railway Museum.

Crowds of well-wishers have turned out to celebrate.

-When you got home, you were black and covered in soot.

-Oh, yes.

-And muck in your eyes.

You could put your head out the window then, you see.

You can't do that now. But you could smell the steam and the smoke.

And go over the bridge and get your knickers all black with soot.

It took a massive public fundraising effort

to save Flying Scotsman for the nation.

More than 6,000 individual donations

ranged from children's pocket money...

If we don't give our pocket money, it might get sold to another country.

..to pensioners' postal orders

and the deep pockets of Sir Richard Branson.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

They did it because the Flying Scotsman

strikes a special chord with us.

For lots of people, Flying Scotsman is a part of what makes them British.

For many, it's simply part of the nation's DNA.

And it's been like that from the beginning.

After the ravages and upheaval of the Great War,

Britain was beginning to get back to normal.

People returned to work and began taking holidays once more.

But travelling around the country wasn't easy.

The road network was poor and cars were still an expensive luxury.

Most people used the train.

Railways were booming after the First World War.

Passenger traffic was extremely heavy.

And the traffic, for example, that went from Edinburgh to King's Cross

or King's Cross to Edinburgh up the East Coast Main Line,

was enormous and growing.

But the railways themselves were in a mess.

Lack of investment during the war

meant that most of the 120 different companies ran at a loss.

In 1921, the Government decided to reorganise them

into just four groups.

The Big Four set about showcasing the best of what they had.

The railways realised very early on in their history

that they could make what might, to some people,

seem quite an unattractive journey

much more attractive by giving it an evocative name,

and by the 1920s this had really reached a fine art.

The Great Western Railway had its Cornish Riviera,

the London, Midland and Scottish had its Royal Scot,

the Southern Railway had the Golden Arrow but the most famous,

the most evocative of all,

was the London and North Eastern Railway's Flying Scotsman.

The London and North Eastern Railway began operating 6,500 miles of track

on January the 1st, 1923.

Its chief mechanical engineer was a young locomotive designer,

Nigel Gresley.

The son of a vicar,

he was educated at the exclusive Marlborough College,

and he began his career as a premium apprentice

in the enormous engineering works in Crewe.

Just 43 when he took over the reins at the LNER,

he became responsible for almost 8,000 locomotives,

ranging from small shunting engines to powerful expresses.

However, the LNER board thought none were powerful enough

to pull the increasingly long and heavy trains

on the London to Edinburgh route.

Gresley planned to solve the problem

by designing a new class of super locomotive.

They would be bigger and more powerful

than any locomotive ever seen in Britain.

And they would be built here,

at the LNER's main railway engineering works in Doncaster.

In the 1920s, more than 4,500 people worked on this site.

And Doncaster wasn't unusual.

Britain was still a world leader in heavy engineering.

Towns like Derby, Swindon and Crewe

were dominated by massive railway engineering works.

They all employed thousands of skilled men.

Peter Tuffrey has spent years

researching the world of the Doncaster Plant Works.

There would be lots of locomotives all lined up here,

all waiting to go into the repair shop

for what was called heavy general repairs.

They would come out and they would go into the paint shop here

and they would be painted, lined, and they would look new and pristine

and go out onto the main line to do their work.

Most of the original plant works have been demolished,

but the erecting shop is still here.

Used these days to repair engines,

in the 1920s, it's where they assembled them.

The LNER, like the other railway companies,

was proud of its engineering tradition

and employed a full-time photographer here.

What a great job it must have been,

coming every day to photograph locomotives.

The sort of job I would have liked, that.

You would always recognise the foreman because he would be,

generally, a portly sort of guy with a bowler hat.

And all the workers would be wearing flat caps

and he would be watching you.

And one thing that does shock me is how young some of the workers are.

They would be 13 and 14, perhaps.

That's quite alarming for us today, I think,

considering the dangers you would find in working conditions here.

This was where the Doncaster workforce

would turn Gresley's designs

for the biggest locomotive ever seen in Britain into the real thing.

The workforce included every engineering skill imaginable.

There were blacksmiths, fitters, boiler makers,

and every component was made in the plant.

The atmosphere would have been charged with heat, sweat and noise.

It really was a hell hole.

The noise in the boiler shop and the repair shop was fantastic.

Which is probably one reason why I'm deaf today!

When he began work as a premium apprentice in Doncaster,

Peter Townend was just 16.

Everything came in as the sort of raw material for a locomotive,

forged and cast.

It got people heating up rivets

and putting through holes and bashing them.

It was out of this cauldron of heat and noise

that the third of Nigel Gresley's new class of super locomotive

emerged on the 7th of February, 1923.

The reaction to it, strikingly, from the men is,

"This is colossal,

"this is an enormous machine."

And not only is it enormous, but, for the first time

the driver has been thought of and all the controls are easily to hand.

And behind the controls was an enormous firebox

with a 42-inch square grate.

The scale of the fire it produced

made sure the engine could maintain steam pressure over long distances.

But it wasn't just size

that distinguished this new class of locomotive

from what had gone before.

The wheel arrangement was completely new.

The most powerful locomotives in the LNER fleet

had a wheel arrangement of four leading wheels,

four main driving wheels

and two trailing wheels under the cab.

This 4-4-2 wheel arrangement was known as an Atlantic class.

Gresley put two extra driving wheels in his new engine

and an extra concealed piston to drive them.

It was called a Pacific class.

By February 1923, the three new LNER Pacifics went to work

pulling the heavy trains on the Flying Scotsman route

between London and Edinburgh.

The third one of these huge Pacifics that they built doesn't have a name.

It runs around the network

and it does the normal work that they want it to do.

And then along comes this invitation from the British Empire Exhibition

to put on a big display

in what is the biggest exhibition the world has ever seen.

The site of the exhibition in North London was massive.

It included a new football stadium,

a specially built train link to central London

and the world's first bus station.

56 countries of the Empire were represented,

and it was opened by King George V on the 23rd of April, 1924.

The British Empire Exhibition was held two years running,

in 1924 and 1925.

It was a great post-First World War celebration

of Britain and its Empire.

It was a celebration of what the Empire could make,

including steam locomotives, of course,

and over two years, millions and millions of people came through

those exhibition halls at Wembley.

At its heart were three massive palaces dedicated to art,

industry and engineering, and the British railway companies

were invited to display the best of their work.

LNER saw it as a perfect opportunity

to promote their latest super Pacific class.

Their newest Pacific locomotive was polished and wrapped up,

but before they sent it off to Wembley, it needed a name.

Tradition had it that locomotives were called after famous people,

places or royalty.

But LNER again came up with something new.

They named the engine after their famous flagship train service.

They named the locomotive Flying Scotsman.

It goes to the Empire Exhibition,

and not only have you got this loco

that looks colossal in British terms,

but it has got the name on the side, Flying Scotsman,

and, really, a legend is born at that moment.

The exhibition had 27 million visitors

over the course of its two years

and Flying Scotsman was the star of the show.

The stroke of genius in its naming

and the huge exposure it received at Wembley

were the first steps on a journey to celebrity status.

Flying Scotsman went back to the job

of pulling trains from London to Edinburgh.

But competition for rail passengers was intense

and the LNER was constantly searching

for new ways to outdo its great rival,

the London, Midland and Scottish railway,

which ran a daily service from London to Glasgow - the Royal Scot.

In 1928, they came up with an idea

that would take Flying Scotsman a step further to becoming a legend.

It would star in an attempt on a world record.

In Gresley's Pacifics, we have, for the first time,

locomotives with the power and the stamina

to run all the way nonstop from London to Edinburgh.

And the marketing department quickly realised this

and decided they wanted to make use of that capability.

It would be a daunting challenge.

No railway company in the world had ever managed to run a train nonstop

over 390 miles.

But there were aspects of Flying Scotsman's design which would help.

The boiler could produce tremendous power.

It was large enough to be able to feed three cylinders with steam

at full pressure, and for long periods.

The limitations weren't technical.

The locomotives could carry enough coal,

they could pick up water en route.

The problem was, to ask a driver and fireman to run that locomotive

all the way from London to Edinburgh

was pushing the limits of human endurance,

if it wasn't downright dangerous.

Normally, the train would stop at a station

and a second crew take over, but this was different.

Because the journey was going to be nonstop,

a second crew would need to be on the train from the outset.

The problem Gresley had was that you have your first crew here in the cab of the locomotive,

you have the replacement crew here in the first coach,

and on normal tenders, you can't get them across.

Gresley's genius was to put a corridor through the tender.

He designs this and, famously, he checks it out

by putting some chairs along the side of his dining room,

and one of his daughters discovers him sort of squeezing along -

cos he's quite a big bloke - squeezing along behind these chairs,

and he says, "Well, if I can get through here,

"my crews can get through here."

In great secrecy, Doncaster Works built a corridor tender,

and on May the 1st, Flying Scotsman sallied forth

from King's Cross on her way to Edinburgh.

It was a momentous day for everyone,

but especially for two of the passengers.

Well, I met my wife for the very first time

on this Flying Scotsman train

on the 1st of May, 1928.

Everybody was matey and excited about this

and we were being greeted on the way

by waving crowds with flags and banners

and all the town bands were turning out.

Everybody on the train got most tremendously friendly.

And we went to lunch and we were engaged within three weeks' time.

And so I was let in for 40 years' hard labour.

Well, I think that it was 40 years hard for me, not for you, anyway!

To run nonstop from London to Edinburgh,

it's a massive piece of co-ordination.

There's over 200 signal boxes en route.

You only need one of those signal men to pull the signals to red and you stop.

And they don't stop.

They completed the 390-mile journey in just over eight hours -

12 minutes ahead of schedule.

It was a world first and Gresley's stroke of genius

was to change the way people travelled,

not just in Britain, but across the globe.

The nonstop run had been a huge triumph for Flying Scotsman.

It had its first world record and its reputation was growing.

The LNER now began to use it to promote the company's profile

as fast, efficient and forward-looking.

The man behind the strategy was the head of advertising, Cecil Dandridge.

He took up his post in 1928

and set about creating a distinctly modern identity for the company.

One of the first things Dandridge did when he got his new job as advertising manager

was to look out for a new typeface for the LNER,

cos type really can suggest a very old-fashioned or a very modern organisation,

depending on what the type looks like,

whether it's serif or sans-serif, curly or straight,

Victorian or modern.

Dandridge went for the modern. He chose a revolutionary typeface -

Gill Sans - from one of the most extraordinary designers

of the interwar years, Eric Gill.

Gill had first used his typeface on a friend's bookshop in Bristol.

LNER took the new style to new heights.

I think LNER were making a very bold decision.

in taking up Eric Gill's very modern typeface,

the sans-serif.

It was like nothing that had been seen before.

He was a very strange mixture of the religious and the controversial.

He was a risk-taker.

He was mad on sex, as one of his friends described him,

and by the time that LNER were commissioning Gill,

he was pretty notorious in the public domain.

Eric Gill's type was so cool, so modern, so clean, so crisp,

so dynamic, that Dandridge thought,

"That's the image for a fast railway."

It went on its posters,

it went on its timetables, it went on its locomotives,

it went on its station name boards, and it looked terrific.

Dandridge commissioned superb modern posters.

Artists like Tom Purvis, Fred Taylor,

Frank Newbould -

these were some of the great poster artists of the 1930s.

And if you look at the posters today,

the combination of these really clear graphic images

celebrating East Coast holiday resorts

or the Flying Scotsman train,

combined with Gill Sans lettering...

Gosh, they look modern even today.

Dandridge and his team were using Flying Scotsman

to create a brand, based on style and speed.

And although they were doing it against a background

of the worst economic depression in Britain's history, it worked.

Crowds of people would line the platform to take a look

at the last word in luxury travel that they could never afford.

It was glamour, style, service.

Cocktail bars, cinema coaches showing newsreels,

hairdressers.

A typical meal in the restaurant car might include pea soup,

followed by roast turbot or roast mutton,

and finishing with Cabinet pudding and cheese and biscuits,

all served with fine wines at your table.

All this happened on the Flying Scotsman train itself.

By the late 1920s, the public's love affair with Flying Scotsman

was well and truly established, and was enhanced in 1929

when the locomotive achieved another first.

It was to star in its own feature film.

When you see the Flying Scotsman train racing through

a very, very, you know, what we'd call today

an unspoilt British landscape,

it looks absolutely terrific and you feel watching it,

"I'd like to be on board that train."

Well, that was certainly what the advertising manager of the LNER wanted you to think.

What the company didn't anticipate was just how the locomotive

was going to be used in the film.

The LNER initially give them full access

and they wheel out the locomotive, the Flying Scotsman.

And they take over the Hertford loop to run the train on

so they can do all their stunts and everything else in real time

with the real train.

Although the LNER aren't too impressed with the actual plotline,

which includes, at one stage,

the heroine, Pauline Johnson,

actually climbs out the outside of the train

and climbs along the train.

It's a scary thing, because it's obviously filmed in real time,

without any stunt people at all.

One of the climatic passages of the film

is where the fireman, who's been sacked,

clambers over the tender while the train's moving

in a bid to knock out the driver.

It was hair-raising, it was scary and it was dangerous to all involved.

The focus on the locomotive carries on throughout the movie.

The film ends with the driver looking up at Flying Scotsman's nameplate

above these huge driving wheels with a tear in his eye

and it goes to show that it wasn't Pauline Johnson or Ray Milland

who were the stars of this film, it was Flying Scotsman herself.

Old Bob, the driver in the film,

is portrayed as having a very human relationship with his engine.

But what was it like in the real world?

King's Cross driver Ron Kennedy drove the Flying Scotsman

regularly in the 1940s and '50s.

It was like having control of a massive monster.

And if you were a good engineman -

and there's a different between drivers and enginemen -

if you were a good engineman,

you used to talk to it and it would talk to you.

TRAIN WHISTLES

I first met this engine as an engine cleaner.

Eventually, I became a driver and was driving the same engine.

You would have the wind against you and maybe rain,

and the wind made a difference, even to a massive engine like this.

You needed a good fireman to produce the steam

because it was a fireman that gave you the power of the steam.

It was controlling the speed. You had to know the speeds of the track.

I mean, it's not start up and go as fast as you can.

There's certain speeds that you're allowed to do.

Of course, when we were first working on these things,

there were no speedometers, drivers never had watches to see the time,

you had to look at the clock on the station

or look at the clock in the signal box as you ran past to know the time.

Speed had always been part of the LNER brand, and in 1934,

speed was at the heart of Nigel Gresley's plan to use Flying Scotsman

for the company's most audacious publicity coup to date.

An attempt on another world record.

To run at 100 miles an hour.

Because locomotives weren't fitted with speedometers,

Gresley coupled a dynamometer car to the train.

The driver on that journey was a man called Bill Sparshatt.

Sparshatt apparently said, when they left Kings Cross station -

there were bystanders there - and he said

"If we hit anything today, we'll hit it hard."

Speed started to rise.

80, 85, 90, 95...

And just before she reached the station of Essendine and had to slow down, she reached the magic ton.

She was the first steam locomotive anywhere in the world

to have verifiably done so.

The driver and fireman arrived at Kings Cross to a celebrity welcome.

Dandridge made sure the press were on hand

to record yet another remarkable achievement.

It made the front page of the newspapers.

The nation was reading about Flying Scotsman

and the nation was captivated.

Everyone, young as well as old, wanted to be part of the story.

If you're thinking trains

and you don't know everything about model railways,

Flying Scotsman rings a bell.

"I've heard about that. That's the set I want, Daddy."

It's a magic locomotive,

a bit like Apollo, a bit like Saturn V.

In those days, it was fast travel.

In the '20s, there were very few people

who actually went further than the town that was next to their village.

So going up to Scotland was like going to another world.

Another universe, quite frankly.

The Flying Scotsman represented that.

They were able to have

a little bit of that sort of travel in their own home with a model.

Models of Flying Scotsman

helped spread its reputation across the country.

Toy manufacturers like Hornby and Bassett Lowke quickly found

the Flying Scotsman became their most popular product.

They were manufacturing replicas using technologies similar

to those that had been used to build the real thing.

The name Flying Scotsman was everywhere.

In just 11 years, it had become a national celebrity.

Flying Scotsman was the fastest steam locomotive in the world.

It could run at 100 miles an hour.

It ran the world's longest distance, nonstop train in the world,

the Flying Scotsman from Edinburgh Waverley to Kings Cross

and back again.

It looked wonderful.

It was speed, sensational beauty, record breaking,

how could the locomotive NOT woo the public?

But celebrity status is nothing if not fickle.

At the very peak of its fame,

the spotlight moved on and Flying Scotsman's star began to wane.

In 1935, Nigel Gresley unveiled a radically new streamlined engine -

the A4 Pacific.

Three years later, one of them - Mallard -

would run at 126 miles per hour,

eclipsing Flying Scotsman's record.

But by September 1939, there were more pressing concerns.

Britain, once again, was at war.

World records and glamorous travel were forgotten.

Flying Scotsman, along with the rest of Britain's fleet of steam engines,

was put to work in the service of the country and largely ignored.

The demands of war put severe strains on the railways,

leaving them completely run down

and, in 1948, they were nationalised.

The LNER disappeared and Flying Scotsman acquired a new owner -

British Rail - and a new number.

Then, as Britain moved into the '50s,

an economic boom put money into people's pockets

and consumer spending began to change the way they lived.

Changes in travel were part of the revolution.

The railways faced a new and potentially lethal competitor.

The number of cars in Britain grew from just over 20,000 in 1930

to almost two million in 1960.

1959 was a key year.

It was the year the first motorway opened

and the car that became the icon of the road, the Mini, was launched.

The road offered a freedom that the railway couldn't match.

While young people going on holiday in Cornwall in 1929

had to use the train,

those in 1959 went on their scooters.

The consequences for Britain's railways were enormous.

They began to lose passengers and freight.

Financial losses mounted.

If they were going to survive, they would need to modernise

and, in 1955, they published a modernisation plan.

Steam would go.

For Flying Scotsman, this was a death sentence.

Along with most of Britain's steam engines, it would be scrapped.

Towards the end of 1962, British Rail announced

that Flying Scotsman would go to the breaker's yard in the new year.

The locomotive had been around for 40 years.

But this was the defining moment in its history.

A group called Save Our Scotsman tried to buy it,

but couldn't get near British Rail's asking price of £3,000 -

£50,000 in today's money.

Then at the 11th hour,

in stepped a very rich steam enthusiast - Alan Pegler.

Alan Pegler was the son of a wealthy industrial family in Nottinghamshire.

From a very young age, he was obsessed with railways.

When he acquired a private pilot's licence, aged just 17,

he used it to chase trains, always his beloved LNER.

In the war, he flew Skua dive bombers for the Fleet Air Arm

and, after the war, he found himself trying to run Northern Rubber,

his family company, which effectively ran itself.

So he found himself in an office,

staring out of the window at the railway, with not a great deal to do.

Alan Pegler had known Flying Scotsman from the beginning.

After the First War, the early 1920s, that engine, Flying Scotsman,

was on exhibition at Wembley.

I was taken by an uncle, or somebody or other, to that exhibition,

sat in the driver's seat of that engine and it was, to me,

the most tremendous thrill and I got a great click out of all that.

Alan Pegler had been involved

in railway preservation from the early 1950s.

When he heard that Scotsman was about to disappear,

he dug deep into his pockets.

He bought it.

If nobody was going to do anything about it, I wanted to

because it seemed to me to be something wrong

that this famous class of engines should all get scrapped.

I can remember when my father bought the engine. I was nine years old

and he came upstairs and he sat on my bed

and he said, "Today, I bought a steam engine."

And he was sparkling. He really was.

It was like a little boy

who had just been out and bought a great big toy!

The whole idea of buying

an express passenger locomotive from British Railways

was something completely new. Nobody had ever done it before.

It would be like going to British Airways today and asking to buy a Jumbo Jet off them.

It was an astonishing notion

and probably only Alan Pegler could have done it.

It was January 1963.

In 40 years of service, the nation's favourite locomotive

had covered millions of miles pulling an express passenger train,

achieved two world records

and, by the skin of its teeth, survived the breaker's yard.

Waving it on to the next stage of its career,

the crowds must have wondered what Alan Pegler had planned for it.

He planned to rebuild the legend of the Scotsman.

He began by taking it back to Doncaster

and restoring it to its LNER livery.

The locomotive went into a shed at the old plant works

and emerged three weeks later transformed,

with its original apple green coat and its old number, 4472.

Then he commissioned its portrait.

'Flying Scotsman is having her portrait painted by Terence Cuneo.

'This is just a sketch for the oil painting

'and Terence Cuneo works from that back in his studio.

'Looks terrific, doesn't she?'

She did. This TV programme, narrated by Johnny Morris,

one of the 1960s' most popular voices, showed that Pegler had inherited

all the LNER's skills in keeping Flying Scotsman in the public eye.

He had an agreement with British Rail

that gave Flying Scotsman unique access to the rail network.

From 1963 until 1968, he used the agreement to the full.

Very nice to be in on time and greeted by such a good crowd.

There is nothing at all in the world

like riding on a steam locomotive at speed.

I think anybody who's been lucky enough to do it would admit that.

He started to send the locomotive on rail tours all over the country

and, in doing so, he brought Flying Scotsman

to an entirely new audience of people who'd never seen it before.

Crowds thronged the line side,

people put pennies on the rails for Flying Scotsman to crush -

everyone wanted a memento, everyone wanted to see it.

'I say, just look at the crowd.

'It's a bit embarrassing to be gawped at so early in the day.

'Come on, let's push on and make way

'for that ordinary-looking thing that's rattling up behind.

'All right, we're moving!'

There's something almost wonderfully comic about Flying Scotsman

running on British Railways in the '60s.

This engine, brought back to its 1920s condition.

It's like a snub to the Beeching-era management

who really were white-heat-of-technology merchants.

Flying Scotsman simply defied that

and matters were made worse for the management of British Railways

because Flying Scotsman was so popular.

"You know, you can't turn engines round like you used to."

"Can't you?" "No, no. Turntables are dying out."

"Oh, because these diesel things can be driven from either end?

"They don't need to be turned round." "Exactly."

"You know, all the fun is going out of life.

"This is one of the railway's best bits of theatre.

"It's better than the revolving stage at the London Palladium."

In the years between the wars,

LNER had used the newspapers

and newsreels to promote Flying Scotsman.

Alan Pegler used television.

He knows what he's got

and he starts rebuilding the legend of Flying Scotsman.

He immediately engages a professional PR company based in London,

and they're easily as good as the LNER people were in the '20s.

You can see this from the kind of media they get

because, within a couple of years of his ownership of it,

it's on Blue Peter.

Well, this is the Flying Scotsman,

the most famous steam locomotive in the world.

Today, she's going to make her very last nonstop steam run

to commemorate the old days of steam on the London to Brighton line.

The train is packed full of railway enthusiasts,

but I've got special permission to ride on the footplate.

It's very nearly time to be off, so I'd better climb aboard.

A whole generation of people believed almost everything John Noakes said.

So it must be true. The most famous locomotive in the world.

This marriage of media and the image of Flying Scotsman,

the steam locomotive,

as an important symbol of the steam age goes on right through

until you get into '68 when they make the documentary of Flying Scotsman's nonstop run from London to Edinburgh.

Right away.

STEAM WHISTLE BLOWS

Alan Pegler wanted to attempt a nonstop run in 1968 to coincide

with the 40th anniversary of the world-record run in 1928.

It was going to be a national event,

large crowds were expected on the track side

and the BBC responded to the nation's enduring love affair

with the Scotsman by making a documentary about the attempt.

They used seven camera crews,

including two helicopters, to shoot the programme.

The role of the BBC, I think, was pretty consistent from the moment

when steam locomotives were really finally under threat.

Before then, there were quite a lot of films made with the BBC saying,

"It's the end of these old timers and the new world has to come..."

that sort of idea in the '50s and '60s.

Then with the steam locomotives finally going, the tone changes.

A sense of, not just nostalgia,

a sense that something very, very beautiful

was about to slip past all our fingers.

Well, I spent 47 year on the railways

and it's a big change from my days to what it is today.

And that's what I've come for today because I think...

I'm approaching 80

and I think it'll be the last time I shall see a steam engine.

The passengers included some very special railway fans,

including the author of Thomas the Tank Engine, the Rev Wilbert Awdry.

I have a railway background and, quite naturally,

the interest transferred itself to my son

and when he was ill with measles at the age of three,

it was most natural for me

to tell him stories about trains.

And he said, "Daddy, what are the engines' names?"

And I invented names on the spur of the moment - Edward, Gordon, Henry.

And so, there it was.

Just like the Reverend's books,

the BBC film was capturing a world that enthralled the public.

But it was a world that was disappearing.

No-one was even sure that Flying Scotsman would make it to Edinburgh.

I did it then simply because I had a feeling

that it would be impossible to do it

if I left it another 10 years to try and do it on the 50th anniversary.

And, my goodness me, I was right because when we did it in 1968,

there were three sets of water troughs left

between London and Edinburgh.

Water troughs along sections of the track

were used to scoop up supplies on the move,

but they were fast being dismantled.

Well, this is a highly dodgy situation that I hoped

we were not going to find ourselves in that we are now in.

We've had two rather poor pick-ups of water and only one good one out of three

and it's really a question now as to whether to take the water

we have got laid on in reserve at Berwick on Tweed,

or whether to take a calculated risk, I suppose is the term,

and carry on beyond the point of no return and try and make Edinburgh.

You are aware, presumably, that there are 1,800 pints of beer on board?

That would be very helpful!

We might be very glad of that! I'm glad you mentioned that!

I think she'd run very well on light ale!

In the event, they did not need the beer.

Alan Pegler's calculated risk paid off

and Flying Scotsman pulled into Edinburgh in under eight hours.

When the programme was transmitted in August 1968,

the day the very last steam train ran on the network,

millions watched. The nation was spellbound.

1968 proved to be a crucial year in the story of Flying Scotsman.

Alan Pegler had saved the engine and, with the media in his wake,

he'd had a ball taking it around the country.

As long as he had been able to run on the network,

he had been able to make money from rail tours.

But the agreement with British Rail was about to end.

They wanted all steam off the network, including Flying Scotsman.

He reasoned that if Flying Scotsman could not make money in Britain,

he'd take it somewhere it could.

He took it to America.

There'd been a long tradition of British Railways

sending their flagship locomotives over to the States for exhibitions.

Pegler, ever this swashbuckling, buccaneering sort of character,

wanted Flying Scotsman to be part of that tradition.

He planned a three-month tour around the east coast states,

and won official support.

The Government and British exporters were more than happy to have

this iconic locomotive showcase the best of British industry.

There were some big names on this tour -

Lloyds Bank, BP, Pretty Polly Tights, the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The brewer Watneys converted

an old observation car into a mobile tavern called the Fireman's Rest.

It was almost like a travelling circus,

complete with a bevy of mini-skirted, glamorous girls

and Alan Pegler acting as ring master.

I went off in 1969, 25 years old,

world's my oyster, had a fantastic time.

People didn't travel as much as they do today

so to go on a locomotive in America and get paid for it...wonderful!

We started off in Boston, Hartford, went right down to Washington.

Every town we went into, the Flying Scotsman would come in going,

toot-toot, blowing steam everywhere.

We had a knight in his armour and he would come out

and walk along the track and we'd march behind him,

all in our kilts and our red jumpers and our tam o'shanters.

It was just like a carnival coming to town.

And then, of course, everybody wanted to meet us,

you were signing autographs

and then we'd set up our stall on the side of the platform

and people would come and buy memorabilia.

The people that came to meet the train!

There'd be hundreds of people! Hundreds!

You'd never believe how many people came to see this locomotive.

At the end of the tour,

everyone flew home, leaving Flying Scotsman itself in storage.

The first tour of 1969-1970 had proved extraordinarily successful.

The businesses had all taken big orders

and, despite its high costs, the tour itself had made a small profit.

At that point, Pegler could have brought Flying Scotsman home

and all would have been good.

But he didn't.

He had been completely seduced by the charms of his engine

and he decided to run another tour in 1972.

This time, though, without any official backing.

The new government in Britain

didn't want the old-fashioned technology of steam

to promote a modern 1970s economy.

Nevertheless he carried on.

He decided to take the locomotive to the west coast.

But the money was running out.

We could only run as an exhibition train.

We weren't allowed to carry passengers due to American law.

The other problem was of my own making -

I'd got hooked on driving the engine.

I'd got it to America, they'd said you drive it,

and I was having a ball driving it and I thought,

"What the hell if the money's going down the drain,

"never get a chance like this again." And I just pressed on.

His daughter Penny joined him.

She witnessed first hand the drain on her father's finances.

I went all the way round the Great Lakes,

all the way across North America, and down to San Francisco.

But by then, money was starting to run out,

so we were not in the grand hotels,

we were in slightly less expensive hotels

and, at the end, we were in sleeping bags crossing the Rockies.

With hindsight, I would say one was barmy to have gone to America at all at that time.

It was just the time when they, the Americans, were getting up to their necks with Vietnam,

the Penn Central Railway was going bankrupt,

on whose tracks we were running for the first 600-700 miles,

and all those things contributed to the fact that life got jolly difficult.

For Alan Pegler and his family, the consequences were devastating.

In late 1972, he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy was a very difficult time for us both, of course.

Everything was sealed and then auctioned.

Everything went, we had nothing.

My father and I never, ever, ever had cross words about it.

That was what he'd done, he'd lived his passion,

it was wonderful. I'd had a fantastic time.

We had wonderful, wonderful memories.

He'd saved this incredible engine.

And that was the story.

Alan Pegler knew how very expensive Flying Scotsman was to maintain.

Over the next 30 years,

two more millionaire owners would discover the same painful lesson.

There was serious concern amongst people in Britain

that Flying Scotsman might never return,

but would be seized by Alan Pegler's creditors.

It was saved by another wealthy railway enthusiast, William McAlpine.

He acted quickly.

Helped by the US tour manager George Hinchcliffe,

McAlpine paid off the creditors

and, by February 1973, he'd got it back to Liverpool.

My thinking was that

if so many people loved her,

the thing must be able to earn enough money to keep itself.

He ran it for more than 20 years

but was acutely aware of the cost of its overhauls.

One of the big issues with every steam locomotive, big or small,

is that you're dealing with old machines and with, effectively, handmade machines.

So, until you take the boiler off,

until you strip everything down to its components,

you simply can't tell what condition they're in

and, with the boiler in particular, if there is a problem,

putting it right is a ferociously expensive business.

When she is bounding along, she really looks like a living thing.

Poetry in motion. She brought responsibilities.

There was always something to spend money on.

I overhauled her at least twice.

And when you think you've done it,

suddenly, she needs this and she needs that.

And what she needed in 1996 was another major overhaul.

Sir William decided he'd had enough

and Flying Scotsman was on the market once more.

It was bought by another millionaire,

Dr Tony Marchington, for £1.45 million.

Then the bills for its restoration started to roll in.

It got a lot darker before it started to get light.

Certainly when this restoration cost

started to head to half a million, then beyond half a million, 600,000,

you thought to yourself, "Where is this going to end?"

But there's no way out but up.

You can't decide in the middle of restoring a steam locomotive,

"I've had enough of this."

What you've actually got is worth a lot less than when you started!

Not until you get it back in one piece again

do you actually see the capital value materialise again.

The overhaul took four years

and cost three-quarters of a million pounds.

It made money for four years

until Flying Scotsman Enterprises went into receivership in 2003.

Tony Marchington became the third millionaire

to have run into financial trouble while owning Flying Scotsman.

The locomotive was put up for sale once more.

This time, the National Railway Museum stepped in.

At that moment they're going to sell it,

the National Railway Museum decides, actually, we should buy it.

The reason we should buy it is everyone thinks we own it anyway.

People have been coming to the museum and one of the questions they ask is,

"Where's Flying Scotsman?"

They think the Railway Museum must own it because it's the most famous locomotive in the world.

In April 2004, after a short and frantic fundraising campaign,

the museum did manage to buy it.

Flying Scotsman, steam sweetheart of the nation, finally belonged to it.

It's wonderful to see the Flying Scotsman finally back

where it should be. And in Britain, thankfully.

My father was one of the original drivers and I think it's marvellous

for everyone that this engine has come to York

because that's where she belongs.

But that isn't the end of the story.

The Flying Scotsman celebrates its 90th birthday in February 2013

in the National Railway Museum workshop.

Just like its previous owners, the museum has discovered

that maintaining an ageing steam locomotive

is a constant and expensive battle against wear and tear.

Perhaps Flying Scotsman is expensive to keep

and it will be expensive to keep for the future.

Is it worth it?

Of course it's worth it!

Flying Scotsman's a glorious piece of technological development,

it's a machine with a soul and a heart

and it's played a critical and key and glamorous role

in 20th-century engineering history and 20th-century society.

In her appearance, in her spectacle, in her sound,

Flying Scotsman epitomises the gloss and the glamour and the sprit of the steam age like nothing else.

There is nothing that matches it and, to top it all,

you have this wonderful name which, in two words,

epitomises the steam age in a way that nothing else ever has.

Britain invented steam locomotion

and it still strikes a chord with our nation.

Steam preservation has helped us reconnect with a shared history,

one that once shaped all our lives

but a world we thought we had lost.

And the image we still associate most with that world?

The Flying Scotsman.

That's why, on its 90th birthday,

it remains the nation's favourite steam engine.

# I get blue when I hear the wooh of a choo choo

# I want you to go too with me on the choo choo

# Forget cares and let go of your troubles and blues

# Let's be gay on our way Let's get on the choo choo... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd