Steam Trains and Engines

When the London, Midland & Scottish Railway was formed, the majority of passenger trains were in the hands of small L.N.W: and Midland Railway 4-4-0 engines which often had to be worked in pairs. By 1926 the shortage of motive power had reached something of a crisis and it fell to Sir Henry Fowler, newly taken over from George Hughes as C.M.E., to produce a locomotive suitable for the heaviest passenger services from Euston to Liverpool, Manchester and Carlisle.

So urgent was this need that a complete set of drawings of MaunselPs ' Lord Nelson ' 4-6-0 was obtained from the Southern Railway, and when in the summer of 1927 the first of the new engines appeared it was seen to be derived from the ' Lord Nelson ' in many respects. Named ' Royal Scot,' No. 6100 was a 3-cylinder 4-6-0 with 6 ft. 9 in. driving wheels, a tractive effort of over 33,000 lb., and a boiler so large that the chimney was almost non-existent.

Further engines soon followed, all named after famous regiments such as ' Cameron Highlander ' and ' The Lancer,' until a total of seventy were in use on all parts of the L.M.S. system; in 1935 the experimental high-pressure locomotive ' Fury ' was rebuilt to conform to the ' Royal Scot' class and numbered in the same series. In 1943 Stanier commenced a general rebuilding of the entire class, with new cylinders, double chimneys and taper boilers; one of these locomotives, No. 46158 'The Loyal Regiment,' is shown here approaching Hereford with a Plymouth-Manchester train.