UK: Beer, steam speed - and money

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Beer, steam speed - and money

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Beer, steam speed - and money

By Trevor Timpson
BBC News

Thirsk station, a Tuesday evening in November. Why is the down platform of the North Yorkshire station full of silently expectant people? Why have people brought their children and grandchildren, and why are they setting up elaborate photo tripods?

Out of the darkness, a whistle is heard - shrieking joyfully, again and again. A train thundering up the line from York.

In seconds, it is all over. A cool grey shape, smoke from its funnel, a line of carriages, mostly dark, the whistle again and again, and a diesel loco on the end - just a passenger on this trip.

All vanish into the darkness, leaving a smell like a hundred coal fires all at once, and the sound of the whistle.

For anyone who thinks of steam locos as 60-year-old veterans puttering down preserved tracks, the sight of a main line engine screaming by on a 75mph test is quite a shock.

That was Tornado, the first steam engine to be built in the UK for almost 50 years. It is 170 tonnes of A1-class locomotive pulling 550 tonnes of train and a great mass of gentle British goodwill.

There are no cheers, just muttered satisfaction as the watchers pack up their cameras and go.

"Wonderful."

"It'll go well on YouTube, will that!"

"All the way from Nottingham, and worth every mile," says ex-policeman Graham Ward, one of the well-wishers who had gathered.

"Marvellous, absolutely marvellous."

Tornado is "a sterling example of the truly amazing things that can happen if people pursue their dreams wholeheartedly - and with incredible professionalism", says Andrew Scott, director of the National Railway Museum.

But the price of beer also had a lot to do with it.

At Newcastle Central, hundreds greet Tornado. Among them are two of the founding fathers of the A1 Steam Trust which built it - financial consultant David Champion and solicitor Stuart Palmer.

"It was a magnificent sight," Mr Champion said.

"We got up in the cab - it was quite something to see how much pleasure it gave everybody."

Earlier, the pair spoke of the business strategy that enabled the trust to raise some ?3m to build the engine, which should enter service pulling excursion trains in the new year.

It grew out of a real sense of loss for what Mr Champion calls "the rock'n'roll and steam generation".

The East Coast Main Line in the 1950s and 60s was the home of a series of magnificent steam engines - including the world record-breaking Mallard.

An example of every major class has survived except the A1, designed by Arthur Peppercorn in the late 1940s. Every single one of them had been scrapped.

"I think it was a bit like if you'd taken the Beatles away from us in 1965," Mr Chamption says.

"At a very formative stage of your life, something you love and are enthusiastic about, they just take it away from you for ever - that created a sense of loss which in 1990 we were able to tap into."

At the core of the plan was a fundraising idea in which supporters were encouraged to donate the monthly equivalent of the price of a pint of beer per week - about ?1.25 in north-east England back then.

Mr Palmer says: "It was David who invented the funding mechanism and it's all down to that that the thing was built... it was sold on the basis of an A1 for the price of a pint of beer a week."

If he had asked contributors to pay ?80 a year, says Mr Champion, "that's asking for a lot of money. If you ask for the price of a pint of beer a week, it makes no difference if you have one more or one less".

This system gave the trust its faithful core of "covenantors" - individuals who undertook to pay regularly each week by standing order - which has given it a steady, reliable income.

"We made a policy," says Mr Palmer.

"We wouldn't have collecting buckets at events; we wouldn't be selling off 25p biros or badges - that was not the way we were going to do it.

"But it wasn't just a question of getting covenanted income - in the early days it was largely down to David going round by himself attracting considerable sponsorship."

"When I think back to the 1950s and 60s a good 30-40% of the boys at school at one time or another were trainspotters; it was a big thing then," says Mr Champion.

"It therefore followed that about 30-40% of the people running British industry had an active or a latent interest in steam engines.

"So there would be a point in my presentation when one of the directors would say, 'You know, I remember flying down Stoke Bank behind one of those things'. And I would think 'I've got you!'"

He told suppliers he did not want a freebie: "But bearing in mind the kind of publicity you're going to get out of this and the fact that it's just a nice thing to do, you might wish to give us a discount.

"And the usual discount was about 70% - but we had a contract, all the certification papers..."

Together, for every pound that contributors gave, the tax reclaimed on charitable donations and paying only 30% for components "meant I'm getting ?5 value for every ?1 that's coming in at the front end of the trust".

"All the stars came together right," Mr Champion recalls.

"Stuart and I were at the right stage of life when we had the professional expertise to put this organisation together.

"The contributors were at the right stage of life where they were starting to get some disposable income... the demographics were absolutely spot-on."

The engineering achievement of building Tornado has been praised.

Engineer Ian Howitt's firm has produced dozens of components for Tornado, including the frames for the tender.

However, he says: "The clever part is not the engineering; it's raising the money - because if you've got the money, you can get the engineering.

"The bravery of saying right, we're going to build this thing which originally was going to cost ?1.5m and practically it's cost about ?3m - that's the clever bit, the organisation and linking it to the cost of a pint of beer."