Interesting moment from page 18 of Furness Railway 150, a history book published in 1996 by the Cumbrian Railways Association—wherein No. 20 appears to be incorrectly identified?
The four engines of 1863 had a short life with the Furness Railway. They were sold in 1870 to the Barrow Hematite Steel Co., where they were converted into four-coupled saddle tanks for use in their works. Further engines of this type were sold to the Barrow Company in 1873, when Nos. 25 & 26 became B.H.S. Co. Nos 17 & 18. Two of these engines, incredibly, survive today, No 18 (B.H.S. Co. No. 7) is being rebuilt to its original form by the F R Trust and No. 25 (B.H.S. Co. No. 17) is at Steamtown, Carnforth.
The one thing that I want to know after reading about Nobby’s NRM friends is his relationship with the LNWR and midland engines.
Also I’m just imagining a funny what-if if he was shunting alongside Cornwall, Hardwicke, and 49395, and everyone prays that world war 3 doesn’t start lol.
I hate to disappoint, but ‘boringly realistic’ is as you know my brand I don’t see those relationships as being that spicy.
I can definitely see the NRM having a recurring theme where some kindly, enthusiastic, naive soul is like “hey! let’s put all the reeeally old engines next to each other for a while and they can reminisce about Victoria and Albert getting hitched, or whatever! :)” and despite warnings they do it and then all the Reeeeally Old Engines are just staring icily at each other in a sort of eight-way armed standoff, each knowing that the first one to speak is going to set off a relitigation of stale old politics and grievances (from both their working and preservation careers) they all know should be buried sixty years ago, except here they are, all kinda itching to fight ‘em again, but also There Are People Around, and, more importantly, There Are Young Engines Around. Wouldn’t want to set a bad example for impressionable young things like Gazelle and Truro.
But the atmosphere? It’s chilly.
That, however, is the reeeeeally old crowd. It doesn't even include the good-natured M.R. lot.
There is no feud between the Furness and Midland survivors. It was never that severe between them, anyway. In fact, back in their working days F.R. No. 4, Coppernob’s brother, would ramble about his admiration of the glamorous Midland 1757 ‘Beatrice’. Remembering his twin’s old fanboy crush, Nobby sank into a deep funk for two days when he heard Beatrice had been dismantled. (This was right before Grouping, and Nobby had no idea just how scrap-happy life was about to get.)
Back in Coppernob’s working days there was just the usual neighborly rivalry when you have two railways full of puffed-up steam engines. The M.R. loved when it finally had a rival company that they could look down upon for underpowered engines—it made such a nice change from their situation at all the other junctions ('The M is for Midland, with engines galore/Two on each train, and begging for more!'). The F.R. rolling stock resented the existential threat that the Midlanders represented, and resented some of their snubs and titters at their rather sorry ‘boat trains’ even more. But the whole thing largely simmered down sometime in the 1880s when the Furness directors firmly told the M.R. that they could pay them roughly six bajillion dollars for their company or they could fuck off, and the M.R. chose the latter option.
Coppernob and 158 are the only two still alive who even remember the thing. There is no grudge. 158 never even worked those regions, and even if she had it’s unlikely Nobby would hold it against her. He can be petty—but he’s not that petty. And 158 couldn’t hurt a fly, let alone stir up century-old bad blood. Among other things, it would be unsporting. There are a good few pre-Grouping Midlanders in the National Collection, and then there’s Nobby all by himself. That would just be mean.
So Nobby is on good terms with all the surviving Midlanders that he's met, and positively cozy with their composite six-wheeler. If he and 158 haven’t become friends, it’s largely down to the fact that, while they have a lot in common, it’s the sort of life experiences that are very painful and they just haven’t gotten round to opening up to each other in that way yet. Maybe give them another fifty years and we’ll see.
But then there’s the L.N.W.R., haha. The Midland just wanted to buy them out and take over their entire outfit, pah! You can fight that. What the L.N.W.R. did hurt way worse. The F.R. had to make a huge noise and fuss to get the 'old' North-Western to even notice them.
The keynote of the F.R.’s rivalry with them in the old days was that the London and North Western was one of the greatest railways in the world and the truth is that the Furnessians admired them very much. The F.R. took a lot of cues on how to do things from their great neighbors to the south (except—unfortunately, from the engines’ point of view—they never bothered to try to imitate the Crewe Works. But, for example, even Nobby’s preservation was itself a very ‘big North-Western’ move on their part). The scrappy, spirited Furnessians were hate-‘em-‘cause-they-ain’t-‘em. They aspired to be them, they never would be them, and whenever the L.N.W.R. noticed their existence they found the F.R.’s little attempts to compete with them entertaining. (You can maybe see why Nobby has a soft spot for James.) Nobby spent much of his first forty years running on pure spite of the ‘North-Western.’ He was always enormously (and not unjustly) proud of his life’s work in helping the F.R. expand and succeed—but that pride was always shattered bitterly whenever he ran into boastful L.N.W.R. stock, who never failed to remind him, with great heartiness, how poor and tardy and out-of-date their whole outfit was. It would throw his whole system out of order for days. He and the rest of his lot hated them—and they simply thought of the Copper-Nobs (when they thought of them at all) as quaint, funny, mildly annoying little things.
This sort of rivalry is just the worst.
The power imbalance has straightened out since 1900, though. Coppernob himself (against all expectations back in the 1840s, when the F.R. had like twelve miles of track and not quite as many coaches) was newsworthy by the time he was withdrawn, if from nothing but the sheer stubbornness of working what was at the time the longest career on British rails.
A quarter-century later, he and Columbine turned over a new leaf when they were put on display next to each other at the Wembley Exhibition—it was really nice for both of them to put away all the old nonsense and actually get to know each other, and they are penpals to this day. (They were also insufferably haughty about their good sense and deportment. The only reason it wasn’t on sight for the two of them was because Flying Scotsman and at least one of the Castles were there, already making a “scene.” Coppernob and Columbine bonded immediately as they basically pretended that they had never been so silly as that, and why were the new Big Four so eager to produce engines with more tractive effort than sense, and yes indeed, back in their day they knew how to express their differences with grace, and—)
It was at the Exhibition of ’25 that the world got to see Nobby’s “guest manner” in action. His whole crotchedy-grandpa-with-a-heart-of-gold shtick that he’d developed while stuck at Barrow Central proved a huge success. (The L.N.W.R. emeriti had mostly been departmental engines once withdrawn—they'd had to develop some public relations game too, but 'talking to visitors' hadn’t been literally their only duty they’d had to practice 24/7 for the past eighteen years.) It sure impressed the hell out of Columbine, and it inspired her to up her game—and to go home and make sure the rest of her railway elders did too. So yeah, ironically enough we did wind up in a situation where (for once! a-men) it was the proud Crewe engines who were scrambling to keep up with a Copper-Nob.
(It’s lucky that Nobby didn’t really grasp the scale of his success at Wembley and indeed the influence he had on the entire British preservation circuit until much later. By the time he did it was well after the Barrow Blitz and he was so famous that it didn’t really matter that his dome grew three sizes that day. Getting bombed? That wasn’t heroic, he didn’t bloody do anything. Becoming as popular as the entire L.N.W.R. lot put together? Now, that. That’s a proper ego boost!)
Most of Nobby’s London and North Western contemporaries—the ones with whom he ever had any real enmity, the ones who used to humiliate him and his—are scrapped. But there are significant strains on their modern truce. He and Cornwall, even though they Conduct Themselves Appropriately, have such a foul enmity poisoning the air between them that they are always housed in different museums. Hardwicke is a generation after all these grand old ‘C’s and perhaps would have been on neutral terms with Coppernob, especially due to their mutual friendships (including with Columbine) and to the sense, shared by all the M.R. engines, that it would be just vulgar to gang up on Coppernob when he’s a party of one… except Nobby once gossiped in Hardwicke’s hearing about the long-dismantled Lady of the Lake (“ ‘Lady of the Lake,’ pah. ‘Witch of the Lagoon,’ more like!” — h/t @houseboatisland) Understandably Hardwicke found this pretty disrespectful and came to the conclusion that Coppernob’s double-edged tongue makes two-or-three on one a perfectly fair match, in his case! While Hardwicke is not as deep in the feud as Cornwall, he does of course back up his old fleetmate and mentor whenever conflict breaks out.
Nobby had no grudge against the old Crewe saddletank on principle—he’d never even heard of her until the 1950s—it’s her personality that led to him rejecting her. (He’s not alone; she’s pretty widely disliked. 1439 has seen and participated in far more scrappings than any living being should and she is, to put it mildly, a little too quick to share a morbid memory.) ‘Pet,’ however—the other old Crewe shunter, the narrow-gauge one—is a much more personable engine and popular with just about everybody; she reminds Nobby in particular of Poppet.
Unlike Nobby’s great success with the M.R. coaches, the old Wolverton carriages maintain the old snobbery in full measure and do not deign to speak to any engines they consider inferior to the L.N.W.R. engines who used to handle them. They've even snubbed the Rocket (yes, the real one), so we can expect that quaint little Coppernob will be in that scorned category forever. (He hasn’t exactly lost sleep over it. I’m not 100% sure he’s even noticed the silent treatment—it took him decades to strike up a conversation with his friend the Midland composite. Engine classism ftw!)
On display in the York NRM is special carriage No. 902502 built by the North Eastern Railway in 1906 and after 1923 continued to be used by the LNER and from 1948 to 1951 by British Railways. This is a dynamometer car which is coupled directly behind the locomotive to record its performance. It was used to record the world beating record speed performance of the steam locomotive MALLARD in July 1938. (x)
I've wanted to write a dynomometer carriage into a fic for a while now as they'd make interesting characters and open interesting plotlines.
I envision them as generally very proper, impartial, poker-faced, tight-lipped. Their duty is to be scrupulously accurate and they follow a proud code of remaining impervious to the wheedling and the threats and the entreaties of engines who would like them to dish some hot goss on their competitors—or to outright lie about their performance!
'02, here, however (known as Carrie in the NRM) I like to think developed one (1) chink in her professional armour—Mallard, of course. She betrayed excitement after his record-setting run (cue the other dynanometers collectively side-eying her) and she has not stopped running her mouth and blissfully reminiscing about the great day ever since.
Carrie continues to go on incessantly about it to this day. She's great with visitors but it drives the other NRM occupants crazy. Even Mallard himself (who once basked in it) is indifferent to her "noise" by this point.
Poor Lode Star there was so desperate to get away from her that in 2019 he volunteered to go into the examination pit. This is considered by far one of the worst jobs in the museum (I mean it's better than Ellerman Lines's deal but that's not saying much) because of the indignity of having visitors just gawk at your undercarriage. But to Lode Star the reprieve from Carrie Oh-Two here was worth it.
