London and North Eastern Railway

From Railways

The London and North Eastern Railway or LNER was the second-largest of the "Big Four" railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921 in Britain. It existed from 1st January 1923 until nationalisation on 1st January 1948. It formed the new British Railways' Eastern Region, North Eastern Region and partially the Scottish Region.

[edit] Formation

The LNER was formed out of a number of constituent railway companies, the major ones were :-

• Great Eastern Railway
• Great Central Railway (formerly the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway)
• Great Northern Railway
• Great North of Scotland Railway
• Hull and Barnsley Railway
• North British Railway
• North Eastern Railway

These were of varying size and fortune, the North Eastern Railway being probably the wealthiest.

[edit] Geographic Area

The LNER, as its name suggests, covered the arc of the country between North and East of London. Within England it encompassed the East Coast Main Line from London to Berwick-on-Tweed via York and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The coverage in Scotland was more confused and included the route from Berwick through Edinburgh to Glasgow via Falkirk and Aberdeen via the Forth Bridge and Dundee, Aberdeen to Inverness, Edinburgh to Carlisle via Peebles and Glasgow to Fort William and hence Mallaig, but not the main line from Perth to Inverness. Most of the country east of the Pennines was the LNER's purview, including the large, flat expanse of East Anglia.

The LNER's main workshops were in Doncaster.

[edit] Paint and livery

The LNER used a number of paint colors on its trains. Most common, though, were lined apple green on its passenger locomotives (much lighter and brighter than the green used by the Great Western Railway) and unlined black on freight locomotives, both with gold lettering. Passenger carriages were often left in a varnished wood finish; often, teak veneer was used.

Some special trains and their A4 Pacific locomotives were painted otherwise, including silver and blue.

[edit] Chief Mechanical Engineers

The public face of a railway system was and is in large part the locomotives and rolling stock in service upon it, and therefore the personalities of the Chief Mechanical Engineers of the LNER impressed their distinctive visions upon the railway.

Like all the new grouped companies there was a problem with who was going to occupy the highest posts in the new company (the GWR had it easy as there was one very large company and a lot of quite small ones, the other groups had all had several components of roughly equal size). At one time it was apparantly intended to leave each of the LNER major companies to run their own affairs, but this plan was dropped.

The next plan was to offer the post to the current incumbents in seniority order (as happened on the LMSR). In due course it was offered to J.G.Robinson of the GCR, but he was already aged 66 and decided to turn it down. Next in Line was Gresley of the GNR.

[edit] Sir Nigel Gresley

Sir Nigel Gresley was the first CME and held the post for the greatest proportion of the LNER's life, and thus he had the greatest effect on the company. He came to the LNER via the Great Northern Railway, where he also held the post of CME. He was noted for his "Big Engine" policy, and is best remembered for his large express passenger locomotives, many times the holder of the world speed record for steam locomotives. A4 class locomotive Mallard holds the record to this day. Gresley died in office in 1941.

Gresley was one of the main motivators behind the idea of a national locomotive testing station (the project that eventually was realised as Rugby testing station in BR days).

He is also notable for a design policy that created a lot of similar classes each having a moderate number of locomotives rather that the small number of classes adopted by the LMSR. How much of this was a difference of ideas between Gresley and Fowler/Stanier and how much was due to the economics background of Sir Josiah Stamp the LMS chairman is now impossible to say.

[edit] Edward Thompson

Edward Thompson's short reign (1941-1946) was a controversial one. A noted detractor of Gresley even before his ascension to the post of CME, there are those who interpret many of his actions as being motivated by dislike of his predecessor. He was a North Eastern man, and it has been suggested that his dislike stemmed partly from Gresley's rejection of the work of Vincent Raven. Against this it must be said that Gresley's designs had their flaws as well as their brilliance. His record is best served by his solid and dependable freight and mixed-traffic locomotive, the B1, built under and for wartime conditions. He retired in 1946.

[edit] Arthur H. Peppercorn

Peppercorn's career was cut short by nationalisation and he only served 18 months in the position of CME. In this short period and in an atmosphere of reconstruction rather than great new endeavors, his only notable designs were his A1 and A2 Pacific express passenger locomotives, most of which were completed after nationalisation. Peppercorn was a student and admirer of Gresley and his locomotives combined the classic lines of Gresley's with the reliability and solidity Gresley's locomotives never quite achieved.

[edit] See Also

• Locomotives of the London and North Eastern Railway