Providing Rail news since 1897 -

A warm welcome to our express trains souvenir

A number of websites have attempted to list them and some have made a pretty good job of it, but we found that the sites differ from each other, are incomplete and that not all have attempted to provide biographical descriptions to make historical sense of the entries.

Of the books mentioned, one is extremely well researched but specialises only in trains that carried headboards, so many named services that ran prior to the 1920s and after the 1970s are not covered, while the others provide a good overview of the subject but are incomplete and refer frustratingly to many trains only ‘in passing’ within chapters devoted to better-known expresses.

As the subject was last covered in depth by The RM as long ago as 1958, it occurred to us that there is a real need for a definitive comprehensive historical survey of the country’s named trains for today’s reader and tomorrow’s researcher.

At first, we thought we might be able to present this in a large article, but as we delved further into the subject, we began to see why nobody has attempted it before. There are far more trains than most people realise and the subject is an absolute minefield of confusion and contradictory evidence! Departure times alone have changed so often over the years that we soon realised we were on a hiding to nothing to try to include them all, so only those that remained reasonably consistent have been left in. Even so, the amount of detail that came to light, even when trying to restrict the descriptions to ‘pen pictures’, made us realise that this could only be covered in a special souvenir issue.

When we came to place the text and illustrations, however, it became apparent that to try to shoehorn it all in was going to result in postage-stamp size images, so we’ve taken the difficult decision to get as much as we can into this edition and conclude the survey in subsequent issues (designed in the same format, but as articles in standard RMs rather than single-theme souvenirs).

Originally, we were going to restrict the survey to the steam era (as that pretty much marked the end of much of the headboards that made the subject of titled trains such an enjoyable one for linesiders in the 1950s and ’60s), but that would have left the survey open-ended, as many train titles continued into the modern era and we would not then have been able to record when they finally ceased, if indeed they did. So we’ve made ourselves hostages to fortune by including modern titles too. As a lot of those have been restricted to timetable footnotes only, and are therefore much less known than headboarded trains, we’ve had to wade through a mountain of timetables to try to pinpoint them, so if we’ve missed any, please let us know.

Only by putting our collective minds together can we hope to identify every single titled train that ever ran on a regular basis, no matter how obscure.

We nevertheless believe we have identified in this register 99% of Britain’s official and regular named trains and that this is therefore the most complete and comprehensive listing ever attempted.

If nothing else, it may encourage today’s train operating companies to resume the virtually lost art of train naming!

Nick Pigott
Editor