80 years on, Nigel Gresley’s V4 loco steams back to life

It was a last hurrah for the locomotive designer who had unleashed the record-breaking Mallard and Flying Scotsman on to the steam network of the old London and North Eastern Railway.
The Gresley class V4 No. 3403. Picture: A1SLTThe Gresley class V4 No. 3403. Picture: A1SLT
The Gresley class V4 No. 3403. Picture: A1SLT

Exactly 80 years ago in York, in what was to be his last public appearance, Sir Nigel Gresley unveiled the Class V4 engines he hoped would set the seal on his remarkable career as perhaps the best-known rail engineer since George Stephenson.

But two months later he was dead, and with him the V4.

Instead of coming off the production line at Doncaster by the dozen, the run was curtailed after just two – and they were scrapped a decade and a half later when their boilers wore out.

Scanning a V4 drawing at the data company Cleardata. Picture: A1SLTScanning a V4 drawing at the data company Cleardata. Picture: A1SLT
Scanning a V4 drawing at the data company Cleardata. Picture: A1SLT
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But with the recreation of 366 of Gresley’s original V4 drawings, a new chapter for the almost forgotten engines began yesterday.

The charity which previously built the Class A1 locomotive Tornado, the first to be built in Britain since the steam age ended, revealed it had commissioned a data retrieval firm to digitise Gresley’s old artwork as the next step towards building an entirely new V4, at a cost of some £3m.

The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust acquired documents, preserved on microfilm, from a Doncaster scrap dealer who had in the 1990s led a previous attempt to build a new example of the class.

By the end of this month they will have been rendered as Computer Aided Design templates that will take Gresley’s ideas forward by a century.

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“We are now well positioned for the formal launch of the project,” said the Trust’s chairman, Steve Davies.

“There will be very little redesign work needed as there were no known problems with the Gresley class V4s.”

That was not the view of Gresley’s successor, Edward Thompson, who cancelled an order for 10 more and embarked instead on an austerity programme of standardised locomotives – turning out more than 400 of the unromantic Class B1 ‘Antelope’ engines instead of any more V4s.

It was the end of the line for Gresley, who had intended the first V4s to be built at Doncaster in 1939. However the war scuppered his plans.

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The new engines were to be capable of pulling mixed traffic on most of the LNER network, especially in Scotland and East Anglia, and Mr Davies said there was “little doubt” that had Gresley lived and war not intervened, they would have become commonplace.

Yet their usefulness survives into today’s tourist market, he added, with the current fondness for steam nostalgia making the new and yet-unnamed V4 ideal for regional main line tours and for “heritage” lines connected to the main network.

However, before building can go ahead, the Trust will have to finish its current project, a newly-built example of Gresley’s P2 Class ‘Mikado locomotive, which is being put together in a workshop in Darlington.

“We have had to do a considerable amount of development work to complete the job that Sir Nigel started,” Mr Davies said.

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