Tornado, a locomotive reborn

Darlington is a well-to-do market town in County Durham that has more in common with other north country islands of prosperity such as Beverley or Ilkley than it has with the nearby coastal former mining and ship-building communities. But as well as being a regional centre for professional services it has a long history as a railway town. For over a century, from 1863 to 1966, the workingmen of Darlington combined their craft and technical skills to produce legions of steam locomotives for the North Eastern Railway and its successors. Darlington Locomotive Works (known as North Road Shops) constructed many of the last express passenger steam locomotives designed for the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) between 1948 and 1950. Forty-nine examples were built to the A1 design at Darlington and Doncaster in only 16 months; it would take 18 years, beginning in 1990, to build one more. Every single example was scrapped in the frenzied rush to move from steam to diesel power that took place in the 1960s. The new-build A1 locomotive was assembled and completed last year, appropriately, in the town of Darlington.


The story of how this was achieved can be read by following this link. The finished article is a triumph of persistence and engineering excellence and has been on a visit to the West Somerset Railway where these photos were taken. It’s not easy to explain to a sceptical audience how these machines continue to exert a grip on the imagination that lasts more than half a century. The sense of connection to a distant past forms part of the explanation and there’s also a link to a lost era of precision craft skills where direct human intervention was a key element in the manufacturing process and the workforce was rewarded with tangible evidence of their efforts. A steam locomotive may be a complex machine but the principles that power it are relatively simple to comprehend. The process that drives the machine forward is visible for all to see in the movement of cylinders and connecting rods responding to injections of pressurised steam. The machine itself begins to acquire some of the characteristics of a living creature and it’s a short step for some of the more susceptible among us to develop the sort of relationship with an inanimate object that others might form with an actual living creature.


As the years advance, childhood memories don’t simply lose definition, they mutate and combine together to create new fictions until a point is reached where there is precious little documentary content remaining. Perhaps events like this that bring us face to face with something last seen more than four decades ago provide us with the illusion of refocusing those diffuse recollections still lodged in remote chambers of the cortex. It felt a bit like that to me, and illusion or not, it also felt immensely satisfying. Which leaves us, in effect, swimming in a warm bath of nostalgia, desperately seeking to dignify the proceedings with some intellectual vertebrae. It can’t really be done but it’s fun to try. One thing I do recall with pleasure from the past that I shall almost certainly never see again is the sight of these locomotives hard at work, labouring under a generous layer of grime and filth, their polished and painted surfaces scarred by leaks of corrosive fluid complete with smokebox doors scorched by over-heating. In case this sounds churlish, I should make it clear that the pristine condition and perfect presentation of this locomotive is an absolute wonder to behold and something that those of us who take an interest in these things, never expected to see again.

Vintage Trams and Street Cars

Urban and suburban visions from a century past. Vintage trams condemned forever by the constraints of the tramline embedded in the roadway, unable to swerve or change direction. Heavy coach-built superstructures that pitched and rolled through crowded city streets; the first mass transit systems of the Machine Age. Postcard details from Europe and North America remind us of the sometimes sinister air of poetry that attaches to these chariots especially when they escape the city and take to the outer suburban routes. Modernism was born in the Age of the Tram. For the Surrealists, the tram was a conveyor of dreams while George Grosz pictured trams as agents of destruction, screaming through the streets packed with the souls of the damned. It’s difficult to see these creatures as the ancestors of the sleek and streamlined vehicles that glide through the outer boulevards of Paris.

Dusty Old Fairground

In the 1930s UK advertisers would routinely associate tobacco products with great moments in our island’s imperial history. Deadly dull and boring images of the likes of Raleigh, Nelson and Shakespeare proliferated, so a little contemporary subject matter makes a welcome change. That said, this is at first sight a diluted and genteel vision of fairground life. The raffish air of menace that attracted the interest of many artists is hard to find. Instead we have a cheery throng of outwardly respectable paragons of the lower middle class exchanging breezily polite phrases on the merits of Player’s cigarettes. Closer examination reveals a few more interesting details such as the abundance of discarded refuse and a toddler in confrontation with a black cat. There appears to be a pickpocket at work in the crowd, a gentleman with a briefcase has been tripped by a kite flyer and on the far right there’s a boot to the backside for a hapless victim. The artist is A A White, a regular cartoonist in Punch magazine, a place where the sort of gentle subversion seen here was very much the order of the day.

Le Pont Roulant

A French engineer named Alexandre Leroyer, displaying a magnificent indifference to appearing ridiculous, designed this precarious structure for the purpose of crossing the entrance to the port of Saint-Malo and conveying passengers to the neighbouring community of Saint-Servain. It went into service in 1873 and might still be in existence today were it not for an unfortunate navigational error on the part of a passing cargo ship that casually destroyed it in 1923. It’s a widely held view that Magnus Volk, Brighton’s first citizen of all things electrical, was inspired by this to construct his infamous and wildly over optimistic coastal railway that fitfully struggled through the waves from Brighton to Rottingdean and back during its mercifully brief life between 1896 and 1901. These wonderful products of the Nineteenth Century imagination, notable for their impudent attempt to conquer time and space with the most slender resources, still possess a haunting power and are most frequently encountered today in the Japanese animations of Hayao Miyazaki.

Le Petit Journal

If you visit the Marché du Livres at Brancion or the flea market at St-Ouen you will find no shortage of dealers offering stacks of ancient yellowing and mildewed copies of Le Petit Journal, mostly priced between €1 and €3 each. This Parisian newspaper printed a Supplément Illustrée on Sundays featuring full page colour illustrations, often based on the week’s most sensational news story. The graphic style employed by the illustrators was similar to the Illustrated London News but the paper stock was vastly inferior. It was the practice of the day for the picture editor to commission the services of an illustrator to produce a colour transcription of a blotchy and indistinct photograph. These two examples give a flavour of the thing. Heartless criminals and dangerous wild animals captured at gunpoint were a staple ingredient along with disasters, natural or man-made. In terms of figure drawing skill they leave a lot to be desired but therein resides much of their charm by presenting moments of great drama in the form of deep-frozen tableau.

Cathedral of Shopping

This triumphal arch forms the entrance to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. It stands on the Piazza del Duomo thus uniting the God of Christendom with the God of Commerce. The interior is cruciform in plan with a central octagon. The internal facades are three storeys in height, above them soars an enormous glazed barrel vault complete with central dome. The floor area is entirely covered by a richly decorative scheme of mosaic work and provides an almost absurdly lavish and opulent space in which to shop. The modest shopping arcade as developed in Britain and France is here inflated to the proportions of a grand cathedral and symbolises the need for the newly united Italian nation state to see its sense of self-importance immortalised in architectural form.


Despite the air of exclusivity, the Galleria is open to all and there seems to be a mismatch between the leisure shirts, shorts and trainers worn by most visitors with the sort of clientele that would be likely to patronise the seriously up-market retailers. Apart from the presence of a McDonald’s, there is very little that would come within the spending power of the average shopper. The shop fronts are intimidatingly polished and perfect, repelling all but the most affluent customer.


A cultural footnote with which to conclude. The final scene in Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novel, Cabal, climaxes with the villain of the piece crashing through the glass of the central dome and plummeting to the mosaic floor below. The corpse touches down on the Coat of Arms of the House of Savoy.

Two Years of Trivia

Today marks the second anniversary of this blog and a trip behind the scenes has been organized by way of celebration. A chance to meet some of the people and personalities who toil for slender reward in the vast trivia plantations where the raw material is produced. The Quality Control Directorate (above) is a highly trained team recruited from the nation’s finest seats of learning. Equipped with the latest in modern technology, their task is to monitor work-in-progress for any references to politics, current affairs or self indulgent philosophising and consign them to oblivion.


The Finance Department (above) is the most critical element in the entire enterprise. The task is to itemise and value every transaction and ensure that invoices are dispatched to the appropriate department in accordance with the principles of the internal market. Management of the budget, target setting, preparation of financial statements and handling expense claims come within the remit of this department.


The Audit Team (above) is responsible for staff appraisal and monitoring overall performance in relation to set targets, in terms of management efficiency and value for money.


The Office of Corporate Governance (above) takes the lead on issues of environmental sustainability, ethical conduct, community outreach and equal opportunities. Staffed exclusively by individuals of the highest moral probity, no mercy is shown towards the smallest deviation from the path of righteousness.