A Ride on the ' Flying Fox ' E VEN Ruskin, who
did not like railways and referred to them as " the loathsomest form of devilry now extant," would have admitted, I think, that our green monster, with her long streamline body and polished brasswork, was a very beautiful piece of workmanship, and as such a thing quite outside the scope of his bitter indictment. As we pulled easily out of King's Cross Station with 400 tons of hotel behind us and began to gather speed along the track which was to lead us—one hoped without check—to Newcastle, 268 miles away, it seemed to me, at any rate, as though this great engine responded like a living thing, like a ship, indeed, under her captain's hand, and all my early enthusiasm for " railway trains " (big, squat-funnelled locomotives especi- ally, painted green or blue) returned in undiminished force.
There were four of us on the footplate of the ' Flying Fox' : the driver (Mr. Pibworth, who has driven this engine since she was built in 1923), the fireman, an additional driver (Mr. Ferguson), with a life-long experi- ence of the difficult, many-signalled road between York and Newcastle, and myself, but there is plenty of room in these huge " Pacific " engines, and a little seat had been rigged up for me beside the left-hand driving lever—in which position, as I found, I was scorched up to the waist by the heat of the furnace, but left cool on top— so that I could see the track ahead. " I don't envy you," a railway official had remarked : " by the time you get to Newcastle you'll be shaken to pieces, dead beat, and as black as a nigger" ; but, although I certainly did finish with a " playin' on de ole banjo " look about me, my adviser was scarcely doing justice to `The Fox's' gentle soporific rhythm, her sway • and lilt and seemingly effortless progress as we raced along. " To us," said Mr. Mutton, the fireman, " it's like sitting in an armchair in the country." As he said this he called my attention to a wayside grass-patch alight with cornflowers, then carried on with his business of feeding five tons of coal into the engine's hungry, white-hot mouth. I felt that the discomfort of the footplate was over-rated, if one was a passenger, but I did not envy the fireman his arm- chair. Somewhere near Wood Green Tunnel the non-stop stopped (how ignominious, and so early, too) for an adverse signal, and we lost .five minutes. That meant making up time, running down the winged minutes that flew before us. And that meant shovelling. " You'll see her go now ! " the fireman shouted at me. And I certainly did.
We crashed through Hitchin exactly as though we were the animated and deliberate earthquake of which Ruskin so savagely wrote, and by the time Huntingdon was reached at least three of the minutes had been overtaken. The sun sparkled on the metals ahead, the country began to open out on either side, with ripening cornfields and the splashed purple of foxglove and willow herb, the air rushed past in a continuous flood of coolness, and presently I began to experience an unfamiliar intoxication in our headlong journey to the North. Speed for speed's sake has never particularly thrilled me, but this thunderous flight as it were on a purposeful cloud of steam was something odd and almost dream-like in its unreality.
One seemed to be detached, in an entirely different world both from that through which one was passing, and from that of the people in the coaches behind. I have always enjoyed looking out of a train window, for one of the advantages of the railway over the motor-road, which its early critics could not have foreseen, is that birds and animals have grown contemptuous of the train, and realize that, however much it may bark, it has no bite provided they leave it alone. An express going at eighty miles an hour flushes all sorts of creatures from the immediate vicinity of the line, and in the engine one has an opportunity of watching their initial behaviour. Rooks delight in sitting on the metals up till the last possible moment. Rabbits sit up and take notice on the first apprehension of the passing whirlwind, but are soon feeding again. Pheasants don't worry, and foxes—I saw one in the woods beyond Sandy, "the Roman station "- simply merge brownly into the undergrowth and are hidden from view by the time the coaches are abreast of them. These birds and animals know that we cannot stay to harm them. We . are not of their country ; we on the footplate are riding a fiery horse that has no grazing in these quiet meadows. And even the little station gardens with their mignonette and marigolds, or the girls in scarlet and blue scarves cutting rushes on the river-bank—that was the Trent : we saw those girls, waved to them, and then were busy about picking up 3,000 gallons of water off the track in five seconds-- seem somehow to belong to a less substantial England than the one we know.
Such imaginings as these, however, should not really be in the picture. To quote Fireman Mutton again, " With three medical and four technical examinations to pass before you become a driver, you don't want to have anything wrong with you on this job." A mind that wanders is perhaps the most dangerous form of ailments conceivable in the circumstances. Yet for all that, there was not much that the 'Flying Fox's' crew did not know about the country through which we were passing, and both had time to notice that I had been fool enough to come without anything to eat. I was at once provided with an excellent cheese-roll, and we had lunch, the driver never taking his eyes from the track as we rocked along northward at eighty miles an hour. That pace, rising to eighty-five, was kept going till we had a check from a " distant " signal (a yellow fishtail signal giving warning that the line may not be cleared ahead) which, however, fell before we had to pull up altogether : and v., on, through Doncaster, where speed was temporarily reduced because this is a junction and we were not taking any risks, to Selby on the Ouse, to York. We crept through that long station like a slow-worm, gathered speed, and ran the rest of the way to Newcastle mainly—so it seemed—at eighty-five, through a cold driving rain that turned the coal-dust to a black mist and made one thankful for the furnace fire. There had been no speedometer in the engine cab, and no official time, but we were not late in by a second, and we were not early. We were on time. " The first time we did this trip," said Fireman Mutton a little dolefully, looking at the solitary policeman who had come (or had he ?) to congratulate the Flying Fox's crew on having achieved the longest non-stop run in the world for the second time, " the first time we did this trip the whole of that platform was black with people who had come to see how we were getting on." Then he uncoupled " The Fox" while Driver Pibworth told him that what he wanted, no doubt, was a nice gold shovel with which to do his armchair work. As the great engine began to move slowly out unattached, I jumped off the footplate and patted her smooth green side. " Good old girl," I thought, " so you've done it again." There was nothing particularly startling, per- haps, in what she had done—when it comes to the mere setting-up of " records " the famous London-Aberdeen races of 1895, with their little 70-ton expresses and relieving trains to pick up belated travellers, were far more sensational—but one cannot travel 268 miles on the footplate of an engine such as the ' Flying Fox' and not feel that, like a ship, she is alive. And I should like to add, despite Fireman Mutton's repeated assertion : " There's nothing in it ; it's only a matter of use," that one cannot travel with the men who run and control these great expresses of modern times without admiring their steadi- ness of nerve, their broadmindedness, and their fine, untroubled acceptance of responsibility—beyond mere
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