Category:Royal Scot (locomotive)

Royal Scot Class locomotive 6110 Grenadier Guardsman [image info]

1928: "The Royal Scot and her 49 Sisters" [image info]

1928: LMS Royal Scot poster [image info]

1930: 6100 Royal Scot, Hornby M0 version (1930 image) [image info]

1933: 6100 Royal Scot, Hornby Book of Trains 1933/34 [image info]

1937: Bassett-Lowke Garden Railways "Royal Scot" 6100 [image info]

1938: Hornby No.3 Royal Scot train set, catalogue image [image info]

Bassett-Lowke advert showing "Royal Scot" and "Flying Scotsman" models [image info]

The LMS Royal Scot Class was a highly successful set of seventy-one 4-6-0 passenger locomotives designed by Henry Fowler. The serious design work started in 1926, and and the locomotives started "rolling out" in significant numbers in 1927. The first of the locomotives was number 6100, Royal Scot. One of the jobs that the Royal Scot locomotives were intended to carry out was to haul the Royal Scot train, which was a London to Glasgow train service that had been running since 1862.

US Tour

The London Midland and Scottish railway decided to send a Royal Scot Class locomotive on a publicity tour of the US in 1933 to coincide with the 1933 Chicago "A Century of Progress" exhibition, and locomotive number 6152 was temporarily assigned the name and number of 6100, for publicity purposes (LMS later did the same thing for the Coronation Scot's tour of the US in 1939).

The Royal Scot Class:

Public profile, and competition with LNER 4472 Flying Scotsman

The profile of the "Royal Scot" loco and train was similar to that of the competing LNER "Flying Scotsman" locomotive and train, and while Bassett-Lowke showed models of the two rival locos side by side under the title "Modern Railway Marvels", Hornby produced their 1927 No.3 locos in both 4472 Flying Scotsman and 6100 Royal Scot versions (although regrettably, neither had the same wheelcount as their originals).

The Royal Scot Class locomotives also appeared on the front cover of The Hornby Book of Trains an improbable number of times during the 1930s.

1937 Bassett-Lowke promotional text:

The Famous "Royal Scot locomotive ranking only second to The "Princess Royal" of the L.M.S. Railway has achieved enormous importance both at home and abroad. This has been more noticeable since her 1933 trip across the Continents of America and Canada, where she performed with undeniable success over mountain roads which were supposed to call for engines specially designed to meet the arduous conditions and heavy gradients of those countries. At the Chicago Exhibition 2,074,348 people passed through the "Royal Scot" train and millions more people examined the engine and train during its extended tour in which 41 towns and cities in America and Canada were visited. At one part of the journey a gradient of 1 in 67 for a distance of 25 miles was carried without assistance, and again during the climb of the famous Rockies, a rise of 1 in 45 was negotiated. The train then reached a height of 3,000 feet above sea level.

In the Model Railway World there has never been a locomotive which prompted so many enquiries and so much favourable comment. The "Royal Scot" bids fair to hold the record for popularity among express locomotives for some long period of time, and the wide interest shown by model railway enthusiasts all over the world has amounted to a request to which we could not fail to respond. Hence the introduction of a model of the "Royal Scot" in a popular scale for a passenger-carrying garden railway.

— , -, , A Scale Model Locomotive for Passenger-carrying Garden Railways, , Bassett-Lowke catalogue, , 1937

Further evolution

After the Royal Scot Class, the next iteration of the design was the Princess Royal Class (which had a more elegantly tapered boiler), and this in turn gave birth to the more powerful Coronation/Duchess Class, which marked the end of the series.

1950 upgrades

The loco class started being upgraded in the 1940s, and 6100 (now "46100" under British Railways) got its turn in 1950. The distinctively "chunky" and slightly crude-looking cylindrical boiler that made the "Scots" look so different to the later "Princesses" was replaced with a more modern tapered boiler, along with the now-common double chimneys that improved efficiency, and the accompanying smoke deflectors that were then required to keep the resulting "softly emitted" steam and smoke from drifting into the driver's line of sight.

The result of all this was a very different-looking locomotive that, from some angles, in bad light, might perhaps at first glance be mistaken for a "Duchess".

In the Media

A Royal Scot Class locomotive featured in the classic "Night Mail" short film

Post-BR

The Royal Scot Class were all withdrawn from service in the early 1960s, with Royal Scot 46110 withdrawn in October 1962. The loco then appeared at Butlins holiday camp in July 1963, after being bought by Billy Butlin and repainted at Crewe Works in the original LMS crimson lake livery that it had had before its 1950 BR transformation.

See also:

• Royal Scot (train)

External links

• "Historic Royal Scot train steams through North Wales on first mainline journey since £1m revamp" (dailypost.co.uk) – 6 Feb 2016

• Icons of Steam - Royal Scot (iconsofsteam.com)
• Royal Scot Locomotive and General Trust (royalscot.org.uk)
• Steam Locomotive 46115 SCOTS GUARDSMAN (docbrown.info) – the other preserved member of the Class

• LMS Royal Scot Class (wikipedia.org)

• Royal Scot 1963 (britishpathe.com) - video
• The Return of 6100 Royal Scot - March 2009 (youtube.com) - video