independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris’. Two plausible reasons: to show contempt for an old unconstitutional establishment, and to mark the exact time of its overthrow. Then again, bullets may just have been flying everywhere.
6 Quoted in ‘Dying of the Past’ by Michael S. Roth, History and Memory, vol. 3, no. 1 (Indiana University Press).
7 Today’s diseases associated with time? There are many: ADHD, cancer, smartphone addiction.
Mallard: small boy not included.
Chapter Three
The Invention of the Timetable
i) The Fastest Thing You Ever Did See
Do you plan on being alive for the next two-and-a-half years? If the answer is yes, you may begin building Mallard. This magnificent British steam locomotive, streamlined and garter blue, is available for construction each week from your newsagent, and if you keep the faith for 130 weeks, and buy all the bits required and assemble them, you will end up with a 500-millimetre-long engine and tender (almost 20 inches), weighing about 2 kilos.
Mallard was originally built in Doncaster in 1938, but in 2013 the publishers Hachette offered the amateur modeller the chance to build a highly detailed replica as a part-work, a precision-tooled miniature of the ‘O’-gauge variety, designed to run on 32mm track (‘track not included’). The model is made from brass, white metal, etched metal and an intricate metallic casting process called ‘lost wax’, and requires not only considerable patience and skill to assemble, but also tools including round-nose pliers and top-cutter pliers, and a recommendation to wear protective gloves and a face mask. When you have finished making your model, you may then paint it (paint not included).
Issue no. 1, priced at only 50p, consists of the first metal parts and a magazine that tells you a bit about Mallard’s history and great railroad enterprises such as the Trans-Siberian Railway. The magazine is hole-punched for easy storage, and, after a few weeks, the magazines should be put in a binder (first binder and dividers included free with your second magazine; subsequent binders not included).
The first choice you must make is whether to superglue or solder (solder not included and not recommended). Instructions for the first week’s parts, which will make the driver’s cab, come in twelve sections and include using the top-cutter pliers to remove all parts from the fret, smoothing the edges with wet and dry sandpaper, punching three dots in each tab to form raised rivets, and placing the left-front cab window bead in position with the pliers. If you actually like doing this you will be delighted with the free Modeller’s Magnifying Glass to inspect the smaller parts (if you reply within 10 days), and a black-and-white A3 print of the original Mallard in thunderous action down a slope.
Issue 2, priced at only £3.99, contains the next part of your model (nose section and boiler skirts) and a feature on the West Highland Line. If you subscribe, you will also get a magnificent set of Mallard drink coasters in a tin. Not much happens with issue 3, apart from the arrival of the main boiler and a price hike to £7.99 (the standard price for each issue from now on), but with issue 4 you get a free Modeller’s Toolkit, including a stainless steel ruler and two mini-clamps. With issue 5 there are details of how to motorise your Mallard when you have completed it (motor not included).1
The bit-part Mallard is a costly enterprise. If you wish to make the whole thing, and surely there can be little point stopping at issue 10 or 50 or 80, then you need to buy all 130 issues, and all 130 issues will cost a total of £1,027.21. The original locomotive from Doncaster, 70 feet long and 165 tons, taking hundreds of thousands of passengers on an express journey from London to Scotland and back for 25 years – about one and a half million miles of track travel in all – cost £8,500. It would be cheaper to buy the kit direct from DJH Model Loco in Consett, County Durham, where, for just £664, you get it all in one delivery in one big box. DJH Model Loco even offers a service in which someone will speed everything up and build the damn model for you in a couple of weeks, although that would surely be missing the point. For Mallard has always been about time. Time is why she was built.
Perhaps you can imagine Mallard coming down the track on Sunday, 3 July 1938. The engine, tender and cars are blue, although whether you’ll be able to see this as it speeds past you is questionable. There is also a rickety brown carriage early in the chain, known as a dynamometer car, and within this are men with stopwatches and machines that resemble primitive lie detectors and heart monitors. The train is travelling so fast that it appears to be ‘hunting’, the phrase engineers use to describe a locomotive hurtling at such a velocity that it is swaying from side to side, as if it was searching for the fastest route to its destination, happy to jump to another track if need be. Its destination is London, but it will overheat long before then.
You are watching the train from Stoke Bank, not far from Grantham. The threat of war hovers. Twelve-year-old Margaret Roberts is at school up the road. The hurtling train, and its memory, will swiftly become one of those iconic pre-war images, like the last of the country-house shooting parties before Britain went dark. What it is about to do will never be bettered, and the anniversaries – 25th, 50th, 60th and so on – just can’t come soon enough. People who love trains love this train as much as they love anything.
Similar locomotives in this group, known as A4 Pacifics, were designed to look and perform like Mallard, and their engineer Nigel Gresley gave them all similar names: Wild Swan, Herring Gull, Guillemot, Bittern and Seagull.2 But to Gresley – 62, in failing health, his designs internationally recognised and copied, his trains, including the Flying Scotsman, lauded for both safety and comfort, an engineer comparable in achievement to the Stephensons and Brunel – none of them appeared to be chosen like Mallard, with her dynamic lines and increased cylinder pressure, and her new brake valves, double chimney and blast-pipe maximising steam production.
At Stoke Bank it has its chance. The ride through Grantham has been slow due to track maintenance, but it has reached Stoke Summit at 75 mph and accelerates now over a long downhill stretch. The speeds at the end of each mile from the summit were recorded as: 87½, 96½, 104, 107, 111½, 116 and 119 mph. The subsequent half-mile readings then gave 120¾, 122½, 123, 124¼.3 And so Joe Duddington, aged 61, an Englishman based in Doncaster, employed by the London and North Eastern Railway since its formation in 1921, and Mallard’s driver that day, pushed her on a little as she thundered past the Lincolnshire village of Little Bytham. ‘She just jumped to life like a live thing!’ he would recall a few years later. ‘Folks in the [dynamometer] car held their breath.’ The train achieved a top speed of 125.88 miles per hour, a steam record that stands to this day.
Time passed. Seventy-five years later, a great gathering of 90 old-timers assembled at the National Railway Museum in York to talk of crewing Mallard and manning the sheds, and to tour another great gathering in the main hall, all six of the surviving A4 streamliners (of 35 built), huge and gleaming, a product of England: Mallard, Dominion of Canada, Bittern, Union of South Africa, Sir Nigel Gresley and Dwight D. Eisenhower. They were all wonderful engines, but Mallard had the celebrity status – the fastest, the only one purchasable in 130 parts, its creator’s favourite – and it did seem to glow more than others, the way
