Locomotive Builder

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30686, 27 February 1965, Page 4

Locomotive Builder

Patrick Stirling’s Locomotives. By L. T. C. Rolt Hamish Hamilton. 64pp. This profusely-illustrated monograph represents an attempt to recapture the full impact which Stirling’s locomotives had on the later Victorians. The text is in more than one sense built round the pictures, which ’ have drawn on practically all | the photographs of Stirling’s, “single drivers” which con-; vey anything of their grace and line. Stirling was a thrifty andi autocratic Scot whose career,,! full of early promise, took; him to the mechanical engineering departments of various English and Scottish railways before he settled with the Great Northern, and laid the basis for its high speed long distance running, which featured In the railway races of 1895, and culminated in the world speed record for; steam; this was held by a I Pacific locomotive whose

blast-pipe design was taken by Sir Nigel Gresley from Stirling’s light-weight fliers. It was Stirling’s thrift which commended him to the shareholders of the Great Northern Railway after his predecessor had been ousted for extravagance, and perhaps it was that same thrift which made him lay down the principle that the strength of a locomotive is in its ability to boil water, and then build them with boilers to small. It was his autocracy which perpetuated his small and in-creasingly-underpowered engines so that his successors had drastically to rebuild or replace rolling-stock on his retirement.

The details of early British railway architecture show clearly the paternal image in which Canterbury’s provincial railways were built The book lacks adequate technical and historical summary tables, but will be a delight to the railway historian or model builder.