CORONATION SCOT

Evening Star, Issue 23371, 14 September 1939, Page 6

CORONATION SCOT

BRITISH TRAIN AT WORLD'S FAIR Visiting America for the new York World’s Fair is one of the proudest achievements of British engineering. It is the Coronation Scot, the train which at ordinary times, runs without a stop between" London and Carlisle, 299 miles, in 4 hours 43 minutes at an average speed of 63 miles an hour. On one trial xt ran at a speed of 100 miles over part of its journey, which, on the way to Carlisle, has some steep gradients. The chief virtue of its performances is the uniformity of its times in either direction. On its test run two years ago tha Coronation engine, Number 6220, first of the five Coronation class Pacific type engines built for the haulage of highspeed trains, ran from London to Crewe at an average speed of 73 miles an hour with 270 tons behind its tender.

In its regular working the Coronation Scot’s engine draws a train of nine cars with a total weight of 297 tons and a length of 540 ft. At one end is a 57ft brake coach with four compartments and a coupe; then a 57ft corridor first-class coach and coupe; an open vestibuled dining car 65ft long; a kitchen car; two 57ft third-class cars; another 60ft kitchen car, and two more 57ft third-class cars.

No attempt has been made to streamline the coaches to carry on the design of the streamlined engine; but both engine and coaches have the same colour scheme of Coronation blue, with parallel silver bands sweeping round the locomotive in graceful curves and continuing horizontally down the whole length of the train. From an engineering point of view chief interest attaches to the locomotives. Every device of boiler heating and steam distribution has been brought into service, and only engineers can estimate the skill, ingenuity, and invention which have been applied to the details—even to the provision of a steam-operated coal-pusher to reduce the amount of shovelling. American problems in railway engineering are different from those in Britain, but the Coronation Scot has suffered from no inferiority complex when brought under American observation.