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The new £3 million Class A1 steam locomotive, 60163 Tornado, built in the UK in nearly 50 years, completed and moves yesterday for the first time.
See the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust website here: http://www.a1steam.com/

The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, the registered charity that is building the first new main line steam locomotive in Britain for almost 50 years, today announced that 60163 Tornado has made her first public move in steam in Darlington. It was attended by Mrs Dorothy Mather, president of The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust and widow of the designer of the class A1s.

This is such a nice site. Thanks Steve - very interesting....

Could start an interesting debate re heritage steam and running new steam!

Some pictures here and video here

BBC report here

"First brand new steam loco" is not strictly true, as brand new narrow gauge steam locos have been built in UK in recent years. But it's the first brand new main line steam loco built in Britain since 1960, which is a great achievement, and probably the first brand new standard gauge steam loco (unless any were built for export after 1960?).

Now we eagerly await David Wardale's 5AT

Interesting fact in this Guardian article:

this is the first main line locomotive - steam, diesel or electric - built in this country since the beginning of the 1990s

New steam locomotive unveiled: £3m Tornado unleashed 40 years after age of steam

After 18 years of fundraising, designing and engineering, trust unveils its locomotive

* Jonathan Glancey
* The Guardian,
* Saturday August 2 2008

"Please send Tornado to the rescue." My text message wings its way through the electronic ether from south of Grantham - where my two-mile-a-minute National Express electric has been reduced to a 20mph crawl due to faults with the overhead lines - to Darlington where, yesterday, Britain's very latest main line railway locomotive was turning its wheels for the first time in public.

Tornado might well have been able to help. For this 160-tonne, 3,000hp locomotive capable of 100mph is powered not by a fickle supply of electricity but by West Midlands coal, Durham water and sweat from a legion of enthusiastic brows. The end product of 18 years of fundraising, revived design skills and tenacious engineering by the members of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, Tornado will soon take to the main lines of Britain, and even of France and Germany, where it will rush trainloads of enthusiasts and others nostalgic for the age of steam at, wherever possible, a steady 90mph.

The astonishing thing about Tornado, a latecoming member of the once 49-strong A1 Pacific class designed for the London and North Eastern Railway just before the nationalisation of Britain's railways in 1948, is that this is the first main line locomotive - steam, diesel or electric - built in this country since the beginning of the 1990s. Shopping-mall, service-economy Britain has very largely abandoned heavy industry and railway locomotives are things seemingly best left to foreigners willing to make large-scale machinery from massive lumps of iron and rolls of steel.

Yesterday, though, it was the trim and perennially stylish Dorothy Mather, 92-year-old widow of Arthur H Peppercorn under whose direction the original A1 Pacifics were designed at Doncaster, 75 miles south of Darlington, who set Tornado's banshee whistle screaming as Graeme Bunker, managing director of Steam Dreams, a steam train touring company and keen engine driver, eased the locomotive away from the shed it had been built in at the old Stockton and Darlington Hopetown Carriage Works. "Absolutely marvellous," said Mather. "Bloody fantastic," said Bunker.

Perhaps the last new British locomotive to be accorded this celebrity status was Evening Star, a class 9F 2-10-0 that rolled out of Swindon works, since closed, in March 1960. Evening Star was the last steam locomotive built for British Railways.

Since the official end of steam on Britain's main line railways 40 years ago this month, steam specials have gradually worked their back on to the lines and into our collective imagination.

"When we first dreamed up the idea of building Tornado in 1990," said David Champion, founding chairman of the A1 trust and formerly with Rothschilds, "we entertained the notion that a whole generation of locospotters, about a third of boys in any school class in the 60s, and a few of their sisters, were grown up and many with decent jobs. All the A1s had been scrapped ... so we reckoned we could tempt mature enthusiasts into shelling out for one."

They did. And, without Lottery funding, the £3m needed to build Tornado was found; in 1949 an original A1 cost £16,000. Naturally, the trust's first patron had to be Dorothy Mather. Her husband, "Pepp", a much-loved figure in railway circles from engine drivers to apprentice engineers, had been an assistant to Sir Nigel Gresley, the man responsible for the design of the world's fastest steam locomotive, the 126mph Mallard, at Doncaster works. Until the early 1960s Mallard sprinted side by side with Peppercorn's A1s at the head of the quickest and heaviest expresses from King's Cross to Edinburgh through Doncaster and Darlington.

Making Tornado was never easy. David Elliott, the project's engineering director, had to track down and scan 1,100 original technical drawings and to ensure that they could be made to make sense to a generation of engineers, machinists and manufacturers for whom steam technology was largely a fresh challenge. The one part of the locomotive that no British company could make was the boiler. In the end the all-welded, high-pressure boiler was made by the German state railway's steam locomotive works at Meiningen.

Will Tornado be as reliable out on the "road" as the Germans might expect her to be? Peter Townend, shed master at King's Cross in the last days of express steam, and now in his 80s, nodded. He had come up from Torquay to see the launch of the locomotive. He said the two finest steam locomotives in his charge were Great Central and Great Eastern, a pair of exceptionally free-running and reliable A1 Pacifics.

"The great thing about Tornado," said Mark Allatt, chairman of the A1 Trust - at 6ft 8in the same same height as the diameter of the Pacific's six driving wheels - "is that the project has involved people from all walks of life, old and new technologies, and it's nurtured tremendous affection, bordering on love." Might the A1 Trust be tempted to build another express steam locomotive? "Watch this space," he says.

In praise of ... steam engines

* Editorial
* The Guardian,
* Saturday August 2 2008

It is almost 40 years since British Rail sent its last mainline steam locomotives to the scrapheap. When the final steam-hauled train left Manchester Victoria station on August 11 1968, and arrived (half an hour late) in Carlisle, most people assumed that the days of rail travel behind snorting, smoking and dirty steam engines was over. The future was to be diesel and electric. But they underestimated the British love of the past - and the emotional pull of steam, which is a vibrant thing compared with the robotic predictability of modern travel. So this month, not only will that last steam journey be recreated on a train pulled by many of the same engines from the same stations, but a brand-new steam locomotive has taken to the rails. Tornado, a recreated Peppercorn A1 engine, made its first run yesterday and will soon be running on mainline railways. It is a copy of a 1940s design, built by the London and North Eastern Railway to pull trains on the east coast mainline, the last of which was scrapped in 1966. The engine is the first to be built from scratch in Britain since 1960. No one can doubt the commitment of the enthusiasts who raised £3m to build it, or the pleasure that people will get from travelling at up to 90mph behind a steam engine. Some might wonder, though, whether Britain's love of past glories has come at a price: a country that can recreate its old trains lags behind the rest of Europe in adopting the best and fastest of the new. France has the TGV. England still loves steam.

Steam dreams: locomotives return to the tracks

After 40 years out of service, steam trains today return to Britain's tracks. Jonathan Brown, whose great-uncle drove the Flying Scotsman, takes his seat on the 'Tornado'

Friday, 1 August 2008
The Independent

A puff of steam and the sweet toot of the whistle announces to the world that the Peppercorn A1 is back from the dead and, with it, the last great locomotive is about to make a dramatic return to the track. Considering the intervening centuries since the technology was perfected, a period during which man has created flying machines that would take him to the Moon and beyond, it seems perhaps a little surprising that the sounding of a locomotive whistle on a grey summer's day in Co Durham should provide such excitement.

But, when it comes to steam trains and the passions they invoke among those who obsess about, chronicle and love these coal-fired kings of the permanent way with a searing intensity, rules governing human expectations do not apply. Here I must express a declaration of interest. My great uncle Bert drove the Flying Scotsman on the King's Cross to Grantham leg of its daily run to Edinburgh, serving his final days as a driver of the mighty A1.

To me, Uncle Bert was a family legend. He began his career shortly after the First World War, cleaning and oiling the machines idolised by every young boy in Edwardian Britain, eventually working his way up from to fireman to driver. Bert revelled in his status: express train drivers were the glamorous aristocrats of the working classes. In truth, he would have driven them for nothing and spoke of little else except trains, at least to the children who gathered eagerly round to listen to his stories of life on the footplate.

And so it is now. At the sound of the A1's first successful whistle test, members of the engineering crew laugh and punch the air, and others gaze dewy-eyed at what they have created in the past two decades. Today, 40 years exactly since the fabled "Last Weekend" when British Rail signalled the end of one type of world and the start of another by running its final scheduled mainline steam services, the new A1, bearing the engine number 60163 and now christened Tornado, will make its first public movement. Some 600 enthusiasts will journey to the North-east from all over Britain to see it and hundreds of thousands across the world will monitor proceedings over the internet. It took an army of 2,000 supporters 18 years to raise the £3m necessary to fund the 150,000 man-hours required to build, from scratch, the first new mainline steam locomotive Britain has witnessed for almost half a century.

For Mark Allatt, chairman of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, who has ruthlessly driven the fundraising process, today's short but symbolic shuttle a few yards along the tracks at Darlington, is the realisation of an audacious dream. The 43-year old-marketing director stands as tall as one of the locomotive's huge steel wheels, an impressive 6ft 8ins. And, just as he has for the past decade, he has given up the annual leave from his City law firm to be close to the engine he loves. The divorced father of one, a self-confessed steam freak, travels thousands of miles to beat the drum for Tornado. Like his fellow Trust directors, he is unpaid, does not claim expenses yet works on the project every day. "People said to me when we set out on this that it would never be done," he says. "They said you will never raise the money. I think we've proved a lot of people wrong."

In recent weeks the 15-strong team completing the final electrical and piping work has been working in top secrecy to keep today as genuine surprise. Chief engineer David Elliott has been toiling up to 70 hours a week on Tornado. After starting his career with British Rail he switched to building helicopters and hovercraft before returning to his first passion, moving his family from Cornwall to Darlington to be alongside the locomotive in 2001. He admits to harbouring a little anxiety. "It feels a bit like when you are in the waiting-room waiting for your wife to give birth for the first time," he says. "After all, this is the culmination of 18 years' hard work. Luckily, I have an extremely supportive wife. I never really have any spare time because even when I'm not working at the shed I'm thinking about the engine. Her view is that if I am messing around with this I'm not likely to be out chasing women."

Darlington occupies a unique position in the history of steam railways. Here, George Stephenson's Locomotion first shuttled coal from the outlying collieries down to be loaded aboard sea-going boats at Stockton-on-Tees. It was also here, at this key stopping-off point on the famous London and North East Railway (LNER), that the steam preservation effort began in earnest. During the white heat of the Victorian technological race, few spared a thought for the past as the railways hurtled into the modern age, battling each other to create ever more powerful engines and increasingly luxurious passenger travel.

But after the Second World War, the Luftwaffe had left Britain's railways in ruins. Britain was bankrupt, so the best coal and steel was sent for export to pay vast war debts. Clement Attlee's Labour government nationalised the railways in 1948 just as Arthur H Peppercorn, the last chief engineer with the LNER, was finishing the designs for his new A1. The prototype was designed to work within the economic limits of those straitened times, built to pull Britain out of dark, post-war austerity.

Cast out of "best Yorkshire steel" Peppercorn decided his locomotive should be able to run fast on the poor coal available and, with its revolutionary roller-bearings, be able to travel 118,000 miles between services. They were to be cheap, reliable and durable.

In just two years, engineers at Doncaster and Darlington produced 49 A1s. It was a proud testament to the engineering skills of the men of the day.

But there was no sentiment among the hard-headed BR managers. By the early 1960s, diesel was the future and the final A1 pulled into York station in 1966 with little fanfare. A working life that should have lasted 50 years was over in barely 18. Fate was to deliver another blow. The crisis in the Congo forced the price of copper to soar and within two years all 49 A1s had been shredded.

As enthusiasts gradually salvaged other locomotives from the scrapyards, the A1 appeared to have been forgotten. But a letter to Steam Railway News in 1990 by Mike Wilson, who went on to become the Trust's first chairman, suggesting that the technology now existed to create a new loco from scratch unleashed a wave of determination in the steam community. Today, the new A1 will start its new life with the late Arthur Peppercorn's 90-year-old widow Dorothy on the footplate. It promises to be an almost faithful copy of the original, but an inch shorter to allow it to operate from today's mainline stations. It will also be packed with state-of-the-art electronics, including a modern safety "black box". As a result, Arthur Peppercorn's baby will be able to pull passenger cars the length and breadth of the UK rail network and beyond at speeds of up to 90mph. A proud day too, for my Uncle Bert.

More photos at Sky News - this seems to have been big in the British media

This is fantastic. I have been observing the progress on Tornado for some years now and am amazed by the never-say-die attitude of the British public wrt steam trains. If only we had a hundredth of the enthusiasm here, we would be well away. Mad loco spotters and Englishmen go out in the midday sun...

Yet more offerings from the great British press:

First British steam locomotive for half a century chugs into action

The first new steam locomotive in Britain for almost half a century chugs into action today after a major fund-raising campaign.

By Graham Tibbetts
Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:10PM BST 01 Aug 2008

Peppercorn Class A1 Pacific 60163 Tornado, a replica of the last passenger steam locomotives, was built by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust in Darlington, Co Durham.

In an 18-year project, the A1 Trust has built Tornado to be fully equipped for use on Britain's main line railways.

Designed by Arthur Peppercorn for the London and North Eastern Railway, the A1s worked from the late 1940s to 1966 when, following the decision to end steam traction on Britain's railways, the last of their class were scrapped.

The project to build a new Peppercorn class A1 was launched in 1990.

So far the project has cost £2.9 million, raised through deeds of covenant, commercial sponsorship and a bonds issue.

Organisers estimate they need a further £66,000 to get Tornado on the main line as quickly as possible and are appealing for donations from the nation's railway enthusiasts to help the cause.

Darlington was at the forefront of the railway age, which began when a line was opened to Stockton in 1825 to carry coal and passengers.

The route included one of the first railway bridges, Skerne Bridge in Darlington, which is the oldest railway bridge in use today.


Nostalgia back on track with first new steam engine in 50 years

By Patrick Sawer
Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:24AM BST 07 Apr 2008

It will be a sight to quicken the pulse of every grown-up schoolboy. The first steam engine to be built in Britain for more than half a century is about to take to the tracks.

The 60163 Tornado, a replica of the last steam locomotive on the East Coast Main Line, between London and Scotland, will be fired up in the next few weeks and taken on the first of a series of test runs before making its commercial debut in the autumn.

Producing 2,500hp, the engine will be capable of up to 60mph. However, its first outing will be a few yards from inside the shed where it is being assembled, at the Darlington Locomotive Works.

The £3 million project is the fruit of 18 years of fund-raising and craftsmanship. The engine has been built to plans for the A1 class, drawn up after the Second World War by Arthur Peppercorn, of the London & North Eastern Railway. Then the age of steam began to wane and the last A1 - 60145 Saint Mungo - was scrapped in 1966.

Mark Allatt, chairman of The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust, said the locomotive would be fitted with additional water capacity and the latest safety electronics. "Tornado will be fully equipped for today's main line railway," he said.

It is hoped that the Tornado will be chartered by companies such as the Orient Express. For further information, see The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust.

The first steam engine built in Britain for 40 years excites the City's Fat Controllers

City life
Telegraph
By Andrew Cave (Filed: 08/05/2006)

Some City people are full of hot air. Fast cars and the latest gadgetry don't do it for them. Instead they are getting steamed up about the imminent arrival of a top German model.

By day in the working week, these are ordinary pinstripe-wearing commuters talking about the weather and coping with delays on the 7.32 to Waterloo.

You might see a flicker of excitement if you catch them chatting about an imminent cross-border European acquisition.

This deal's got intriguing codenames such as St Mungo and Peppercorn and involves furtive trips to the industrial backwaters of Darlington.

Don't call the police when you overhear talk of conjugated valve gear or text Sven when you're tipped off about this fantastic new German centre forward called Walschaerts.

It's just the City's gricers. Yes, of course the Square Mile's got them too. Steam railway fanatics are everywhere and these ones also have the money to be able to realise their Thomas the Tank Engine dreams.

For Jones the Steam, read Mark Allatt, global brand director at business advisory firm Deloitte and chairman of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust.

For non-trainspotters, A1 - not to be confused with the rival to Formula One that's storming around motor tracks in the Middle East - it is a long-extinct steam engine built to the designs of the London and North East Railway's last chief mechanical engineer Arthur Peppercorn.

There were 49 built in 1948 and 1949 but the last one, 60145 St Mungo was scrapped in 1966.

There are none to be found even on the keenest amateur railway circuit. At least not until the trust unleashes its Tornado.

Conceived in 1990, the Tornado is an all-new A1 steam train being put together in Darlington.

The last important component, a replica LNER Diagram 118 boiler (these details are important, you know), is on track to arrive from Dampflowerk Meiningen in Germany this July.

If all goes well, the Tornado will be in steam by the end of next year - the first new steam train to be built in Britain for more than 40 years.

Allatt and fellow City steam-nuts, former UBS vice-president Barry Wilson, former Ernst & Young partner Wreford Voge and Arriva Trains Wales managing director Graeme Bunker (yes, that really is his name) are terribly excited.

"I have absolutely no idea why I became fascinated by steam trains," says Allatt, "since the last one was scrapped when I was only a few months old.

"I am told that I went to see the Flying Scotsman when it was preserved in Sheffield and I was 18 months old. It must have made a great impression on me, though I can't remember it.

"I was never a trainspotter. There were no steam trains for me to spot. By the time I was old enough, they had all gone."

The trust already has commitments for £1.65m of the £2m it needs for the project from 1,500 supporters and corporate sponsors.

GNER chief executive Christopher Garnett is a big fan of the project, while celebrities ranging from the late Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack, to MP Alan Milburn have been to Darlington to have a look.

"We decided from the outset that this was not going to be the sort of thing where we sold a load of pens for charity," says Allatt.

"We would have to sell one to just about every person in the country."

Instead, the trust asks for regular Gift-Aided donations and invites members to take up the remaining £180,000 of a £500,000 bond issue organised to fund the boiler.

It also offers various bits of the Tornado up for sponsorship.

"You can pay for the cost of a boiler tube for about £100," says Allatt enticingly, "or other parts that cost £10,000 or so."

Which greasy bits has he chosen? "I've got the bit that's like the accelerator on a car," he says proudly. "It's what the driver pulls to make it work. I think I paid about £700." And what's this fine instrument called. The regulator, of course.

Trust a management consultant to want to sponsor that.

The trouble is that steam projects to date have tended to go somewhat off track or run out of puff.

Music promoter Pete Waterman famously described his turn at owning the Flying Scotsman as "a bit like the Tutankhamun Curse".

"Everyone who's owned it so far has gone bankrupt," he said. "I only owned it for six months and it didn't half put a dent in my finances.

"It's a poisoned chalice and it makes people do the stupidest things."

Former Oxford Molecular chief executive Tony Marchington found that out the hard way too, He bought the Flying Scotsman for £1.25m in 1996, floating a company to take care of the venture.

What happened? Let's just say it hit the buffers and the engine in now in the National Railway Museum.

Allatt is adamant that A1 is different. Most of the funding is in place and talks have been held about using the Tornado to pull the Pullman carriages of the Orient-Express.

"It's not fair to dwell on the problems that other projects have had," he says.

"This is the first time anyone has tried to do something like this. This is about the country's heritage. We're not doing this to make a profit but the project will break even. It will wash its face."

Well, quite. Even Thomas had to do that from time to time.

andrew.cave@telegraph.co.uk

It is exciting! I actually followed the project after a fashion a long time back and stopped as I thought it would get no further then a paper project!

14 days to go on the Steam Car attempt.

The uk.railway newsgroup has inadvertently answered my question about new standard gauge steam locos being built in UK by pointing out that replicas of a number of early steam locomotives have been built brand new in recent years - indeed I have ridden behind some of them at Beamish industrial museum in County Durham. Tornado is basically the latest in a long line of replicas, albeit on an exponentially grander scale.

So Tornado's claim to being the "first" is twofold - the first main line steam locomotive built in UK since 1960, and, as the Guardian article (above) points out, the first main line railway engine of any sort built in UK since the early 1990s. It's nostalgic to remember that not so many years ago Britain was still one of the major suppliers of all types of railway locomotive all over the world.

A number of other new builds are planned or already underway. David Wardale's 5AT is still in the planning stage. But several groups have taken ex-Barry wrecks of which there are already representatives in preservation to use as a basis for construction of a completely different locomotive which has not survived into preservation. This is possible because there was some degree of standardisation in boilers, wheels, tenders, etc between certain classes of loco.

The Railway Magazine ran some stories from August 2006 to February 2008 on what they refer to as "Lazarus Locomotives" or "Locos back from the dead". These are basically new build locos, not simply restoration of hulks, but they often incorporate some parts from other locos.

Projects which are either in progress, in the planning stage or on someone's wish list include (with the ones nearer the top of the list being nearer to completion and the ones nearer the bottom being rather more dreamy):

• BR WD 2-8-0 no 90733
• BR 'Clan' Pacific no 72010 Hengist
• LBSC H2 4-4-0 no 32434 Beachy Head
• GWR 'County' 4-6-0 no 1014 County of Glamorgan
• GWR 'Saint' 4-6-0 no 2999 Lady of Legend
• GWR 'Grange' 4-6-0 no 6880
• BR Standard 2MT 2-6-2T no 84030
• BR Standard 3MT 2-6-2T no 82045
• GWR steam railmotor no 93
• LNER F5 class 2-4-2T no 67218
• GWR '4300' class Mogul no 9351
• NER Worsdell G5 0-4-4T no 67306
• LMS 'Patriot' 4-6-0 no 45551 Sir Henry Fowler
• GWR Churchward 'County' 4-4-2T and 4-4-0 tender locos
• LNER P2 2-8-2 no 2001 Cock o' the North

A friend in London has just shown me the centre-page spread from a recent Daily Mail showing the controls on the footplate of Tornado - a very nice picture which I haven't been able to find on the internet yet.

I wouldn't be seen dead with the Mail (or Telegraph, for that matter - right-wing rags!) but here's the Mail non-political article on this. I love this quote:

The whole project is delightfully bonkers, so utterly British...

Absolutely chuffed!

What happened when 30 grown men gave up 18 years to build a steam train

Mail Online
Last updated at 2:00 PM on 31st May 2008

Ask any child to draw a picture of a train and you will invariably get the same result: a cylindrical boiler shape, with some big wheels underneath, a cab and a chimney belching steam and smoke at the front.

In other words, the classic railway locomotive. Nobody draws a picture of a diesel or an electric train. To a child there is only one noise a train can make: 'choo choo'.

Plenty of enthusiasts love old cars and planes, but only a steam engine has the ability to make everyone - young and old, male and female - sigh with pleasure as it chuffs past.

Steam enthusiasm is certainly not unique to Britain, but there are more clubs and preservation societies here than anywhere else.

Perhaps because we invented the mighty steam engine, its power is engraved upon our psyche. But it's still all very odd.

No one much under the age of 45 can possibly remember the days when Britain's last, clanking steam trains - blackened, rusty and unloved - plied their dying trade along British Rail's tracks.

But here in Darlington, steam never went away. Here, in this small and unassuming North-Eastern town an extraordinary labour of love is coming to an end after 18 years.

It's a project which makes no sense on paper - but it has created 90 tons of polished, gleaming, shining nostalgia. Above all, it means the world to the small team behind it.

Their aim? It's ambitious, to say the least. To build, by hand, the first new full-sized mainline steam express locomotive in Britain for half a century.

Since 1990, a team of around 30 enthusiasts, contractors, volunteers and staff - under the banner of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust - have turned up every day to an old shed and happily milled and turned, cast, drilled, bored, welded and torqued mountains of gleaming brass, copper and nickel-silver steel to create a machine that belongs in another age.

In a few weeks, all being well, the boiler will be fired and their locomotive, christened Tornado, will turn its wheels for the first time.

The whole project is delightfully bonkers, so utterly British that just stepping through the doors of the workshop and getting a whiff of oil and acetylene, hot brass and stove enamel is enough to blow away the cynicism that comes from living in the 21st century.

This is the world of blue overalls and mugs of tea, lathes and people who talk in pure engineering-speak.

'This is the nearest humanity has got to reproducing itself in metal,' says the project's engineering director David Elliott. As he takes me around this behemoth I can see what he means.

You can't help but be struck by the sheer size, the massive Brunellian weight, the precision. I run my hands along one of the valve rods, two yards long.

Elliott notices, with some distress, a tiny dint in the brute steel, maybe a quarter of an inch long. 'Oh dear, someone's dropped something, we'll have to get that dressed out.' Perfectionism to an almost surreal degree is the order of the game here.

A steam engine is fundamentally a simple device (light a fire, boil water, use the steam to push a piston back and forth and turn the wheels), but these enthusiasts make it sound like nuclear physics.

I shimmy around underneath, everything is bright and clean, red-and-shiny steel. But it won't be like this ever again.

Once Tornado is up and running, this pristine space will become a nightmarish hell of blackened hot metal, dripping oil and glowing cinders.

This is no restoration of an old engine. Everything, save a couple of gauges and dials, has been made from scratch, using original engineering plans.

Tornado is now the only existing example of the Peppercorn A1, one of the last big 3,000-horsepower express passenger locomotives built by the London and North-Eastern Railway in the 1940s, and operated along the East Coast Main Line by BR until the 1960s.

Why this engine? For a start, the A1 was perhaps the ultimate post-war steam locomotive. And because only the A1 class, among all the other big locos, have no other surviving examples left.

Forty-nine were made - and all were scrapped in the ruthless cull that followed BR's decision to abandon steam in the Sixties.

To my surprise, David Elliott is no misty-eyed steam fundamentalist. 'Oh no, you couldn't bring back steam. Economically, it was the right thing to do to bring in diesel and electric power.'

Die-hard enthusiasts may lament the passing of an era - but the reality was British Rail had no choice. On scrapping steam, BR's fuel bill fell from £27million a year to £9m. Reality trumps romance.

The problem stems from the physics of steam power. When the world's first passenger trains ran from here in Darlington to nearby Stockton in 1825, ushering in the age of motorised transport, the primitive engines managed to harness less than 4 per cent of the energy in the coal into locomotion.

By 1900 the technology had improved these figures to 5 per cent. By 1948, when LNER Chief Engineer Arthur Peppercorn built his fleet of A1s, steam was reaching the giddy heights of 8 per cent efficiency. Good, but nowhere near as good as the 20 per cent you get from diesel.

And one question they certainly wouldn't have asked back in 1825 was my next one: 'What's the carbon footprint of this thing?'

'I'd hate to think,' says David Elliott. A quick calculation reveals that, by burning a hundredweight of coal every 21/2 miles, Tornado churns out - in modern emissions - about 15,000 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre travelled. That's 90 times the emissions of a small car.

Still, with the ability to haul 12 coaches at 100mph the carbon footprint per passenger is still tiny compared to even the most economical car.

At the moment Tornado is not alive. Like a science-fiction monster, a steam engine like this starts to breathe only when the fire is lit, the steam pressure builds and when its retinue of staff begin to pander to its every whim. (In fact when the boiler was first tested, the fire was lit by the widow of original designer Arthur Peppercorn).

Driving a steam locomotive has been likened to conducting a thunderstorm. Controlling a huge, angry animal might be a better analogy.

It is nothing like operating any other kind of machine and feels like a mixture of a workout at the gym, a stint on a church organ and an exercise in concentration. Get it wrong and you will be killed or very badly hurt, indeed.

The controls, for example, are not the simple devices you find in a car or a plane or even a motorboat. Steam engines have to be tuned, coaxed, cosseted and occasionally threatened and prodded into obeying your orders.

I had a go once, on a much smaller, simpler engine. I was exhausted after a few miles. How these men drove one of these for eight hours at a stint is a bewilderment.

Turn a brass handwheel, wrench a lever, open a valve and rarely anything happens instantaneously.

No wonder it takes months, years even, to learn how to drive one of these magnificent beasts properly. In contrast, a child could get the hang of stopping and starting a modern diesel in minutes.

For a start you cannot just turn a steam locomotive on or off. It isn't even just a case of filling it with water, lighting the fire and waiting for it to boil.

Steam locos have to be kept dormant, rather than left to fall dead, when they are not being used. They must be kept warm and fed with a trickle of coal, issuing a faint hiss of escaping vapours as they spend the night in the engine shed.

The skill of the driver is matched by the sheer physicality that is the fireman's job. On an incline, at full tilt, he will have to shovel coal into the gaping maw of the burner at the rate of a sack every minute or so. For mile after mile, hour after hour.

Creature comforts are zero. There is a seat, but little else. It is hot, dirty, painful, muscle-wrenching and suffocating work. Hard edges and burning metal everywhere. And no facilities.

'What do they do on a long run?' I ask.

'Out the side, or on to the shovel and into the fire.' 'And what about food and drink?'

'Well, there's a billycan of tea. And they would cook their food, er, on the shovel. The same shovel.'

Despite the hardships and dangers, driving or firing a passenger express train was, in the golden age of steam, perhaps the creme de la creme of working-class jobs.

These men were lionised, and very well-paid. In an era when rail travel was still glamorous, driving a train was the ambition of millions of boys who were otherwise destined for the safe and comfortable world of the professions.

In 1938, driving an engine like the world record-breaking Mallard (a streamlined LNER design) was roughly akin to being an astronaut.

Now a select band of people will get a chance to relive the romance. After its first run in August, Tornado will be put through a series of safety trials, before being put into service to earn a living hauling enthusiasts.

She will be able to travel on Britain's mainline express routes and, the Trust hopes, will be allowed to run at three-figure speeds.

There are even plans to take Tornado aboard, on to the tracks of France and Germany, through the Channel Tunnel.

All this has been achieved for the sum of £3million, raised through a mixture of company sponsorship and hundreds of private donations.

Despite the inefficiencies of steam power, the railways of the 1960s were in many ways a delight compared to today. They were certainly cheap and, in subsidy terms, a bargain for the taxpayer as well.

David Elliott is scathing about the post-privatisation mess that is today's railway. 'The way it was handled was a nightmare,' he says.

Britain's 108 preserved railways are models of calm efficiency, polite service and value for money compared to today's shambolic 'real' railways.

Travelling by train in Britain today, one gets the impression that the people who run our railways have nothing but contempt for their passengers.

Perhaps they should hand the whole lot over to people like David Elliott and his team.

Someone who blanches at a near-invisible dint in a bit of valve gear would, one suspects, sack the lot of them and start again.

Brilliant. Now if only 3117 or 2850!