Page 98 - Vía Libre Special - 25 Years of Spanish High Speed Rail

history
brake van

GONZALO RUBIO Cab of the Series 103 which in 2006 beat the

world speed record for a commercial train.

interpreted as vanguardist contributions, as was the would gradually but irreversibly replace the legen-
case, for example, of Marinetti who when he sang dary steam locomotives, precisely when they were at
“the broad-chested locomotives which paw the rails their technological peak.
like enormous steel horses bridled with tubes” en- A diesel locomotive was capable of travelling
dowed railway speed with the sacred nature of his at 200 km/h in 1939, but it was an electric train that
futuristic declaration. set the speed record exclusively under its own power.
On June 6, 1932 the “Tregenna Castle” (230-
5006) reached a speed of 148.6 km/h on the Great The three hundreds
Western Railway. This record was convincingly
broken a few days later, on August 27, by the “Silver In 1955 the SNCF decided to carry out a trial
Fox” (Pacific A4) when, hauling a train in commercial to see if they could reach 300 km/h on conventio-
service weighing 270 tons, put the bar up to 181.93 nal infrastructure. So on March 29 of that year, on
km/h. And it would appear that a German locomotive the endless straights of Les Landes, whose tracks
- 232-05001 – first broke the 200 km/h barrier when
on May 11, 1936 it pushed the speedometer needle up
to 200.445 km/h.
Into the two hundreds

But the definitive milestone was reached on
July 3, 1938. On this day Pacific A4 Mallard locomotive
of the British LNER, designed by the company’s chief
traction engineer, Nigel Gresle carrying number 4468,
reached a speed of 201.5 km/h between Stoke and Pe-
terborough while hauling seven carriages.
The train was aerodynamic since it was de-
signed specifically to achieve the record and since
the dynamometer car included to officially record
the event clocked 202.860 km/h, this remains the
highest speed ever officially reached by a steam lo-
comotive.
The engine driver was Joseph ‘Joe’ Dudding-
ton and the stoker Thomas ‘Tommy’ Bray, and they
shared the cab with inspector Sid Jenkins, so Ángel
Maestro tells us. The wheels of the locomotive, which
is on show at the York National Railway Museum, had
to turn eight times per second (529.5 rpm), in other
words, twice the normal speed.
The history of railway speeds would enter A Confederation locomotive which in 1955, hauling
two trains with weights of 435 and 480 tons
into a new dimension with the arrival of new power respectively, on the San Vicente de Calders-Vilanova I
sources, such as liquid fuel and electricity, which la Geltrú route, reached a speed of 140 km/h.

98 Vía Libre • Special 25th Anniversary of the AVE Edition