LNER A4s in service.

[70014IronDuke]

They apparently made a few trips over the Settle & Carlisle. It seems that most, if not all, the appearances were due to late substitutions.

Yes. I think this was c 61-3 time, when being displaced from ECML front-line service. Presumably on The Waverley and Thames-Clyde, or possibly holiday reliefs. Don't know if they were ever used on the Edboro and Glasgow sleepers.

There is a mention in the Railway Observer (April 1961 issue) that ex-works A4 60004 made it’s first appearance for over a year on a passenger train at Newcastle on 22/2/61. The report also adds that this (elusive) A4 had been relegated to freight work throughout 1960 and restricted to the Waverley route.

I wonder how they did that in practice (if true)? I mean, was there a standard procedure to limit one locomotive exceptionally to one route, or did the shed foreman (or whatever he was at Haymarket) just tell his shift foremen "Keep awl Willie to Waverley!"

Can you imagine such a policy today, if it got out? There would be a twitter meltdown. "Jinxed loco hoisted on Hawick public" ....

And I wonder if Whitelaw's family (who presumably lived near the London end of the route?) ever wondered why they never saw 'their' loco at the southern end of the line?

One of the things missing from stations today is surely trainspotters' graffiti laments. These were not massive spray paint things, of course, mere ball-point scribblings that normals would not normally see.

I remember that at Sandy, on the branch line platform south end, there was a white-painted post with dozens of anguished lamentations along the lines of: "I died here waiting for Streak 9."

It's difficult to be sure now, but from memory they nearly all involved Haymarket A4s, though some may have mentioned even more elusive, evocatively named Carlisle Canal A3s or perhaps some of the Scottish-based A2s such as Sayajirao and Blue Peter.

Sadly, it's one of those things that nobody ever deemed worthy to photograph, as far as I know. Perhaps I should copy this onto the 'Things you don't see on stations today' thread.

 

[Helvellyn]

And I wonder if Whitelaw's family (who presumably lived near the London end of the route?) ever wondered why they never saw 'their' loco at the southern end of the line?

William Whitelaw looks to have lived in Dunbartonshire, although most likely had a London home given as well as being the LNER's Chairman also serving as Conservative MP for Perth in the late Nineteenth Century.

His grandson, also William Whitelaw, was MP for Penrith and the Border from 1955-1983. So the loco named after his grandfather would have been travelling through a very small part of his constituency to/from Carlisle (albeit Carlisle itself was a separate constituency).

As Margaret Thatcher's Deputy until 1988 the later Whitelaw was the the inadvertent star of the completely unintended joke when Mrs T famously stated that, "every Prime Minister needs a Willie."