Worship
Worship. There was no other word for it, there in the temple that is the great hall at The National Railway Museum at York, for, lined up around the turntable, were six of the most beautiful locos ever designed, the A4 Gresley Pacifics, known to everyone who's ever been a platform-ender as "streaks". Mallard, the record-breaker (though it's rumoured that an unauthorised run by a Merchant Navy class loco topped it), Bittern, Sir Nigel Gresley (named after the designer), Dwight D Eisenhower, Dominion of Canada and Union of South Africa, all bulled up to the nines. Most of us there, who'd queued on a one-in-one-out basis so great was the demand, were, on a weekday in term-time, old enough to have travelled in trains hauled by one of these locos and to remember when Ike was the US president.
Steam locomotion is one of the few things to move the English to talk to strangers, so we had grand conversations with a former A4 driver, with a chap who'd driven up from Warrington and with someone from Nottingham and his friend who lived on the outskirts of York. Nobody complained about queueing, everyone was there to worship six of the best.
They called it The Great Gathering and it was, not just of A4s but of men and women still nostalgic for the great days of steam.
Steam locomotion is one of the few things to move the English to talk to strangers, so we had grand conversations with a former A4 driver, with a chap who'd driven up from Warrington and with someone from Nottingham and his friend who lived on the outskirts of York. Nobody complained about queueing, everyone was there to worship six of the best.
They called it The Great Gathering and it was, not just of A4s but of men and women still nostalgic for the great days of steam.