The Friends of the Far North Line
Cairdean Na Loine Tuath
the campaign group for rail north of
Inverness - lobbying for improved services for the local user, tourist and freight
operator
In January 1935 LNER Chief Mechanical Engineer Nigel Gresley obtained Board permission to design a new train - locomotive and carriages - to celebrate King George V's Silver Jubilee. The train would run at unprecedented speed from Kings Cross to Newcastle and back.
Gresley had been impressed by a visit to Hamburg two years earlier when he had seen the streamlined train on the Berlin run, and by the Bugatti-inspired locomotives in Italy. The rivalry between LNER and LMS led both companies to design locomotives capable of much higher speeds than were possible before then.LNER's Silver Jubilee entered service in September 1935 - a mere eight months from pencil hitting drawing board to locomotive (Silver Link) hitting 100 mph for a sustained 43 miles on its first passenger-carrying run. Silver Link ran the return service every day for a fortnight until the second A4 (Quicksilver) left Doncaster. Silver King and Silver Fox completed the quartet. It's a great shame that Silver Link was not preserved, unlike six of her sisters including, of course, Mallard, the proud possessor of the steam speed record of 126 mph on 3 July 1938 - unbroken to this day.
Why all the nostalgia? Small boys well into their 80s are allowed a little excursion into the past, but there is a powerful lesson to be learnt. A revolutionary new design - streamlining - went from "Build it" to "Right away" in eight months. When did the Lentran Loop first get this ex-small boy jumping up and down? When did Network Rail start to see merit in the idea? When did a pencil hit a drawing board? When will a shovel hit dirt? And all Pandora wants is several hundred metres of railway line. Nothing fancy, no ground-breaking (sorry) design. Just routine stuff.
And the cost? Ah, there's the rub. Pandora's uninformed guess is that it will be at least twice what it would have cost if someone had got round to building it all those years ago when the jumping up and down first started.
But it's not just a little loop at Lentran: it's the thinking that has been allowed to infect all major infrastructure works, and not just on the railway, and not just in Scotland. A bright idea spends far too long before it becomes a proposal; far too long on a designer's desk before it becomes a detailed plan; far too long on a Minister's desk before it gets put to the Treasury (or equivalent): far too long before it gets the go-ahead. Once that happens it's pretty quick, especially if it's only a little bit of railway line. Eight months should be more than enough.