Travels with a Duchess Steam Days

BBC Four Collections - archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Gary Boyd-Hope has selected programmes

celebrating Britain's steam railway legacy.

More programs on this theme

and other BBC Four collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

There are more steam engines to be seen now on British rail lines

than there have been for 20 years.

Of them all, I think the most romantic is the Duchess of Hamilton.

And of all the lines in England still open,

the toughest must be the Settle to Carlisle railway.

What is not so well known is that 30 years ago,

I was the proud owner of the Duchess of Hamilton.

She was nine inches long, weighed well over a pound

and kept falling off at the corners.

Now, at last, I've come face-to-face with the real Duchess,

who weighs over 100 tons in her stockinged feet

and pull 500 tons with a full train. It was worth waiting for!

The Duchess lives at York in the National Railway Museum

but she sallies forth regularly

to haul special trains over long distances.

For this, she has to be prepared and fired up the day before

by Pete, the fireman, and Kim, the engineer -

prepared with extra care if you're climbing the Settle-Carlisle line.

I spent five years in my youth sitting beside a railway line

collecting train numbers, hardly ever going home.

It's what they call a misspent youth.

I shouldn't have been collecting numbers,

I should have been finding out how engines actually work.

Well, it's never too late to learn.

First thing we do is make sure

that the boiler has actually got water in it.

Because if it hasn't, it'll explode?

You'll do quite a lot of damage if it hadn't.

Well, I think it's about time we lit it now. The boiler is all right.

- It's got plenty of water in. - All right?

- Delighted. - All right.

Right.

They're quite fussy about the kind of coal they use.

Welsh coal's not bad,

but Yorkshire's good and Nottinghamshire is quite good too.

During the miners' strike, they found themselves using Polish coal.

They didn't like it much.

How long does the coal take to light? Does it take fire immediately?

Three or four minutes until the coal is actually burning.

That's better than my fire!

We've previously coaled the firebox,

filled the firebox full of coal first.

- You've got all the coal you need? - Nearly all the coal.

You don't set off with a little bit then build up?

No, about six inch cover.

And what's the fullest it ever gets? Is that about it?

No, when the engine's working

you can have probably about three quarters of a ton in there.

It takes about six hours to get the boiler into steam from cold.

So really, Kim, we're sitting under a huge boiler

which is mounted on huge wheels.

What I want to know is, how does the steam get to the wheels?

Well, the boiler, which is all that red mass, is full of water

and at the top there's what we call the dome

and in there there's the regulator valve or throttle valve.

The steam then comes from that regulator valve,

through into the smoke box,

which is this black mass at the front here,

and it's then what we call superheated,

which is the steam is then taken in tubes, back through the fire tubes,

and heated even more to a higher temperature.

This engine, when it's working hard,

can get up to about 700 degrees Fahrenheit.

And then that comes from the super heater

and it comes down to the cylinders.

This particular locomotive's got four cylinders.

There's one on either side and two hidden between the frames.

This part here, that's the valve

that lets the steam be admitted to one or the other side of the pistons.

This is a double acting engine, not like a car engine.

It's double acting. The piston is actually pulled and pushed.

And this valve up here

controls which side of the piston that that steam's going to hit.

So, all the power is in there?

The power is all in the cylinders, yes.

And just that little cylinder pushes this thing?

Well, this and three other cylinders, yeah.

It's then transmitted through this cross-head,

because that piston wouldn't be strong.

It would bend if it hadn't got support from these bars,

and then down to the connecting rod,

into rotary motion down onto the crank,

which is incorporated in the wheel.

This is one that's actually driven by the cylinders.

The other one is the leading one.

And that's driven by the inside cylinder?

That's driven by the inside cylinders.

- And that's connected along? - That's connected by a side rod

which connects all six driving wheels together

so that you've got better adhesion.

- And it really makes a difference? - That makes a lot of difference.

Before the war, the London Midland Scottish Railway

was lagging badly behind the other lines

with nothing nearly as powerful on their express routes

as the Great Western Kings.

So they tempted William Stanier,

the wizard designer of the Great Western,

to come over to them and create something fast and sleek.

By 1938, he'd come up with the goods -

the Princess and Duchess classes.

It was in that year that the Duchess of Hamilton was born at Crewe.

All manner of smaller parts are made in the smithy -

nuts and bolts in all sizes and varieties,

rivets by the tens of thousands.

This is where the mysteries go in.

A modern engine, such as 6207, has a big appetite for steam,

hence her large greater area of 45 square feet

and her high amount of tubing.

First to go in is the main steam pipe,

through the centre of which

will later go the rod connecting the regulator handle to the valve.

Meanwhile, things have been happening at the other end of the boiler

and some familiar objects have been

finding their way onto the fire-door plate.

One of the most amazing sights is the way heavy loads,

and mostly awkward and cumbersome ones, are slung about in the work.

A screech from the overhead crane,

rattling hooks descending out of the air en route

and, almost before you can say knife,

a load of some 50 tons up to a complete engine

is whisked away to a new position.

She's off!

1,000 men have served her in the making.

How many thousands will she serve during her life on the LMS mainline?

Is this what they call a Pacific class?

That's right, yeah.

And that's something to do with the wheels, isn't it?

Yeah, you've got four carrying wheels at the front,

then you've six driving wheels,

and then two little carrying wheels at the back.

So it's not the Duchess class, or it is a Duchess class as well?

Well, the proper term for them, the LMS call them Princess Coronations.

- What do you call them? - Duchesses.

And did it look like this when it was first built?

Oh, no, no. It had a streamlined casing on it.

Why did they do that?

Helped to cut the wind resistance down,

so in theory you burnt less coal.

They seem to have gone through a fashion for streamlining then

they stopped doing it, so it couldn't have been that effective?

Well, it's very difficult to keep the engine in good maintenance

when you've got to get behind the casing every time to do daily jobs.

Just before the war, there really was a mania for speed,

for being the fastest steam engine on earth

or for winning the transatlantic Blue Riband.

And things were made to look that way, as well,

with the streamlining stripes even going down the carriages.

Maybe it somehow helped to counteract the depression of the 1930s?

Oddly enough, the streamlined look is back with us again today

on British Rail's InterCity trains.

No sooner was the Duchess built

than she was sent to America to appear at the New York World's Fair.

The Americans had heard all about

the crack express from London to Scotland, the Coronation Scot,

and the Coronation engine was what they wanted.

What they got was the Duchess.

They changed the nameplates and the number.

Isn't that what we call cheating?

Well, yes, but it was done quite a bit with the locos.

To meet American regulations, that had to be fitted with a headlight,

plus they put a bell on it.

Was that just for fun? You don't have to have that.

- No, that was their regulation. - Really?

Shipping the Coronation Scot engine at Southampton is quite a job,

for it weighs 100 tons.

Driver Bishop and fireman Carswell are there to see it put aboard.

As the locomotive is lifted from the quayside by the ship's derrick,

the vessel takes a list,

but rights herself again as it's swung over the hull.

The ship that takes it across, by the way, is Norwegian.

The train is going to America to tour the country

and to be on show at the World's Fair.

A month before the fair ended, the Second World War broke out

and the Duchess was stuck in America.

There she stayed, being seen by an amazing 3 million visitors,

until 1942, when the LMS decided to risk bringing her back

on a midwinter trans-Atlantic convoy.

Luckily she arrived safe and sound in Cardiff that February.

They needed it for the war effort, you know. It was difficult.

They hadn't really got enough locos to keep the traffic moving.

The war traffic.

So everything that they could find was more or less put into traffic.

I always imagined that trains were sort of restricted during the war?

Oh, no, there was enormous movements of materials

and troops during the war.

From the ports,

trains took the battle weary men to the dispersal points.

At the shortest possible notice,

special trains were hurriedly assembled

and in the space of eight days

620 specials were run from seven ports in the south-east of England.

The war was good for the railways, then? I didn't realise that.

- Well, yeah. - Good business.

It nearly wore the railways out, actually.

What happened when steam started being phased out and diesel came in?

Well, they gradually got displaced.

They were put onto empty coaching stock trains

and freight trains, just to finish up their useful life.

- And when they died, they died... - That's right.

..in a scrapyard. How come Duchesses survived then?

Well, it was just luck more than anything.

Mr Butlin decided he would like some attractions at certain holiday camps

and this was one that was bought, along with the Duchess of Sutherland.

- Where did this one go? - Minehead.

MUSIC: "I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside" by John A Glover-Kind

After quite a bit of time, somebody asked, "Why are they in there

"and do Butlins still want them?

"Wouldn't it be nice to have them in a museum?"

And after a period of a few years, that was agreed,

that Butlins would then release them.

So it actually still belongs to Butlins, then?

It still belongs to them.

They could get it back any time they wanted,

they could take it back to the holiday camp?

In theory, yes.

How much did it cost to put this together again,

when all the operations had been done on the abdomen and the guts?

- Around about £40,000. - 40,000.

How much did it cost to build in the first place?

- 11,300. - To build?

That's inflation.

What I'd never realised was

just how full of steam a steam engine really is.

Smoke may come out of the chimney,

but everything else is steam, with no electricity to help at all.

If you want sand on the line to help the wheels grip,

you'd blow it out by steam.

If you want more water in the boiler, you blow it in by steam.

The Duchess has steam pipes the way we have blood vessels.

Cut her, she bleeds steam.

Well, I think I understand how it all works now,

except for one thing - how do you actually start it?

Right, well, we'll show you

because we're now going to move off the shed in any case.

You have to turn this handle on. That creates a brake.

- So as you can get the brakes on. - Right.

So, first thing you have to make sure of,

you can stop before you move.

That's got to come round 21 inches of mercury.

There it is.

We test it. We then take the engine and the handbrake off.

- Seems fairly complicated. - Not really.

Then we move this lever to whichever direction we want to go.

In this case, backwards.

ENGINE WHISTLES

And pull this lever...

and that will move.

Magic.

When you've gone far enough, this one stops it.

So have you got any more to do before the run tomorrow?

No, we're all ready for tomorrow now.

Well, I'm sorry to hear that, because it means I've got to get off.

Right, bye!

If anyone can be called a Duchess's best friend it's Kim,

who accompanies her everywhere with an oily rag,

like a butler with a napkin.

On the great day itself,

Kim isn't actually allowed to drive the engine on a British Rail line.

Only full-time British Rail drivers can do that.

Not that there are many people left in British Rail who still know how!

Maybe one day we'll have lots of steam engines and no steam drivers.

One thing we'll never run out of, though, is steam train enthusiasts,

and for today's heavyweight contest between the Duchess of Hamilton

and the Settle to Carlisle railway, every seat has been booked in advance

by enthusiasts, nostalgics, connoisseurs and experts.

One of them is local historian and non-stop enthusiast Colin Speakman.

This is Settle and the beginning of the line?

That's right. It was the known as the long drag, of course,

because the climb starts here

and it's something like 20-odd miles of continuous climb,

a tremendous amount of work for locomotive men and their crews.

Especially with steam engines.

That's right, and the steam engines, yeah.

Little easier with diesel, obviously.

The reason the line is here is nothing to do with

the desire of people in Settle to have a day out in Carlisle

or even vice versa.

It's because the Midland Railway were desperate

to get their own express mainline to Scotland

and the only way they could drive it was over the mountains.

Progress was so hard that they even petitioned Parliament

to be allowed to give it up.

Parliament refused permission,

so the Midlands spent five long, horrible, dirty, cold years

completing the line, and the worst bit for the builders then,

and the engine now, is the 15-mile long drag to the summit.

Nobody knows quite how powerful the Duchess is

because they've never been able to shovel coal in fast enough

to get her up to full power.

It's not the train that reaches 100% output, it's the fireman.

Even two firemen wouldn't be enough.

The line was built by thousands of Irish navvies living in townships

rather like gold-rush towns,

with their own shops, chapels, even tramways.

It's odd to think the Romans were here for hundreds of years

and left hardly anything behind except Hadrian's Wall.

The Irish were here for just five and left great monuments behind -

bridges, tunnels, viaducts.

The greatest of all is the Ribblehead Viaduct, now crumbling so much

that passage across it is restricted to one line in the middle.

The rise and fall of the Irish empire, indeed.

People keep talking about the Ribblehead Viaduct

as if it was the big one. Is there something special about it?

Well, again, it's a long and very colourful history.

Initially, of course, they simply wanted to fill in Batty Moss bog

and run it across the top.

But they found it was quite impossible,

so they hit upon a really rather brilliant engineering solution -

to build this enormous viaduct out of local sandstone and limestone.

But inevitably, it's now suffering from wear and tear.

It lasted well over a century but it'll be a major problem to maintain

and it could in fact be the great question mark

over the future of this railway.

You mean the whole line could exist

but there'd be a little gap in the middle?

That's right.

There's talk of stopping the trains at one end of the viaduct

and making people walk to the far end and continuing on the next train.

We hope it won't happen.

So, this is the dreaded Blea Moor Tunnel?

Yes, a dreadful, nasty hole,

something like 2,500 feet long, 500 feet underground

and a place that was very difficult to build.

A lot of lives lost, a lot of expense

and railwaymen, I think, have always hated it,

particularly in the days of steam trains.

It was a very nasty place to go through.

I've never met anyone who liked it at all, no.

Is this weather typical on the line?

Do you ever get good days to go up here?

Well we sometimes talk about Settle-Carlisle weather.

That's the kind of days where the rain comes sideways.

But at the same time, it can change remarkably quickly

and be incredibly beautiful in a matter of moments.

We're very near the summit now,

something like 1,100 feet above sea level.

That's high.

We're at Dent Head, coming up to Dent station,

which in fact is the highest station on any railway line,

certainly in England and Wales.

And nowhere near Dent, as far as I can make out?

Four and a half miles away, so it was quite a long walk

when you arrived at Dent to walk between the station and the town.

People often ask the old story, you know, why was the station there?

Answer, because the railway line was there.

What are those strange pillar like things over there?

Snow fences. One of the problems on this line, of course,

is that the weather can create tremendous difficulties.

There are stories of trains disappearing under snowdrifts

for something like three or four days

before they could finally dig them out.

This stop is Garsdale, but it's the same thing every stop -

all the experts leave their seats and come rushing forward

to photograph the engine and peer at its workings.

They remind me rather of a squad of medical men

making sure the Duchess doesn't have the slightest cough or splutter,

even though she's smoking so much.

The surgeons themselves are dressed in orange operating jackets.

These are the super enthusiasts, who handle coal, and the water,

and of course, the crowds.

Can you cross behind the photographers, please,

ladies and gentlemen, then you won't be in the way.

ENGINE WHISTLES

You get the impression,

going through this beautiful but desolate countryside,

that the builders of the line had only one place in mind -

faraway Glasgow.

What I wonder is how much the people who lived here

got from the new railway.

Quite a lot. Local farming, for example, benefited.

The dairy industry, it became possible to get your milk collected

and taken to the nearest railway station, for example Appleby,

and taken even on overnight trains to London,

Express Dairies, Eden Vale dairies,

they all developed dairy farming in the region.

Is that where the yoghurt comes from?

Originally, it gave a great stimulus to the local economy.

Of course, we're not the only film crew out today.

Almost everyone on the train seems to be producing and directing,

shooting their own film, and at Appleby station

the Duchess responds by putting on a special show for the cameras,

as well as full sound effects for the microphones.

STEAM ROARS

Closing the Settle-Carlisle line

could do serious damage to the Japanese photographic industry,

not to mention wipe out the British anorak business!

ENGINE WHISTLES

The funny thing is that conservationists like you,

who fight to keep the line open, would probably 100 years ago

have fought to stop it being built in the first place.

Oh, I've absolutely no doubt about the fact,

but the fact that it was built and is there

and is a great piece of architecture

means, I think, we ought to make the best of it. We ought to use it.

So it's bigger than just a railway line,

it's part of historical heritage?

I think so. It's part of the evolution, certainly,

of the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales and the Eden Valley.

Somebody once said that the Settle to Carlisle line was "nowt but scenery,"

and this is certainly true after Appleby,

when the hills retreat into a watchful distance

and the line slides quietly through the Eden Valley -

a land flowing with milk and yogurt.

ENGINE WHISTLES

After that back breaking run up to the summit,

it's a gentle jog to Carlisle, the border town

where the Midland finally linked up with Scotland

in that profitable line to Glasgow.

Today, the train turns right here, off to Newcastle, home to York,

but I get off to find a train back to London.

It'll be a good, fast electric train.

They won't have had to spend hours loading it up with coal and water.

You just switch it on and off it goes.

This is the way the world is going. I know all this.

I also know it won't be half so grand or aristocratic or breathtaking

as the train we've been on today.

It won't even smell half as good.

The next day, I'll have forgotten all about my electric ride to London.

But once you've been over the top with the Duchess of Hamilton

the memory stays with you, forever.