Living locally at the time this event was too good to miss. Although free – I was disappointed that the engines were not positioned well enough to get many good shots. It was very busy and reminded me of the Deltic Farewell event at Doncaster in 1982 with people everywhere. I suppose that’s what you paid a premium for the exclusive photography events held on an evening.
Having seen the two unrestored A4’s imported from the USA and Canada in 2012, The National Railway Museum at Shildon ‘Locomotion’ was the location for the final reunion of the six surviving Gresley A4 Pacific locomotives as part of the National Railway Museum’s Mallard 75 project in 2014. Mallard joined its five surviving sisters to mark the 75th anniversary of Britain’s unsurpassed world steam speed record – between 15th February and 23rd February 2014.
The Great Goodbye was the largest event hosted at Locomotion to date with over 120,000 visitors over the 9 days, and was a great prelude as the museum moved into its 10th anniversary year in 2014.
Locomotive legend Mallard raced into history on 3rd July 1938 when it broke the world steam speed record. On that day, the mighty blue Mallard was recorded as reaching the awe-inspiring speed of 126mph on the East Coast Main Line, breaking the existing German record of 124 mph set in 1936.
On the 3rd July 2013, the National Railway Museum in York made history when the world’s fastest steam locomotive Mallard was united with its five surviving sister engines in the museum’s Great Hall for the first time, a spectacular international family reunion to mark the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s record-breaking run. The following fortnight, nearly 140,000 visitors from all over the world, including Canada, the US and Australia flocked to the York-based museum to celebrate Mallard’s achievement and see the amazing sight of the six survivors together for the first time. The Mallard 75 series of events and activities, of which HRH the Prince of Wales is Patron, continued throughout the year. This finale took place at Locomotion, the National Railway Museum at Shildon in February. The final gathering of the A4 locomotives is very likely to be the last time that the six locomotives can be seen together in this lifetime.
In order to make the reunion possible, in March 2012 the National Railway Museum reached a formal agreement with transatlantic colleagues at Exporail, the Canadian National Railway Museum in Montreal, and the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to bring two A4 class locomotives back to the UK; No. 60010 Dominion of Canada and No. 60008 Dwight D Eisenhower, on loan to the National Railway Museum for two years. Both locomotives arrived on UK soil in October 2012 after an epic transcontinental trek by rail flat car across North America and a 2,527-mile journey across the Atlantic by boat.
