Big End Trouble

Mallard's setting up of the speed record came with a price. About a couple of years or so ago I was in the National Railway Museum in York and as luck would have it, one of the guides was an old engine driver who once drove this famous "streak." Lying besid the loco in the museum on the loco's left side is a conn-rod; the one that was on Mallard at the time of that record breaking run. The big-end bearing on the middle left hand driver had run out. Consequently the crankpin was distorted a little. The poor girl has had big-end problems ever since.
It just goes to show, even machines get arthritis! But she is a beautiful old lady nonetheless. She sits in the museum beside another gracious "Dame of the Iron Road", the V2, Green Arrow. That loco has taken me from Sunderland to Newcastle on many gricing trips during my childhood. Although in those days she was a rather scruffy black arrow.

Norman