Flying Scotsman: full steam ahead after £4.2m refit

The Flying Scotsman has made its inaugural journey following a decade-long, £4.2 million refit.

The world famous locomotive travelled from London King's Cross to York, where it will go on display at the National Railway Museum.[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"content_original","fid":"91424","attributes":{"class":"media-image","style":"font-size: 0.8125em;"}}]]

Bearing the traditional green livery of early 1960s British Rail, the train left King's Cross as scheduled at 7.40am, but was briefly held up by people standing on the track to take photos near St Neots, in Cambridgeshire.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Passengers said the Scotsman came to a "shuddering stop" due to photographers on the track and Virgin Trains East Coast warned other services were being delayed by up to 15 minutes.

On board for the five-hour trip were 297 VIPs, fundraisers, competition winners and ticket-buying members of the public, says the Guardian.

Among them was Great British Railway Journeys presenter Michael Portillo, who said: "This is certainly the most famous journey and most famous locomotive in Britain."

The Flying Scotsman was "an engineering triumph", added the former MP, who was filming the journey for a BBC documentary. He also praised its designer, Sir Nigel Gresley, for having "an eye for engineering, for design, for style and for marketing".

Paul Kirkman, the director of the National Railway Museum, said the Flying Scotsman was a reminder that "railways have been making this country run properly for nearly 200 years".

The museum bought the locomotive for £2.3m in 2004, before work got under way on its restoration two years later.

It had been a "long old journey", said Kirkman, but it was "incredibly satisfying" to see the locomotive returned to service. It will stay at the museum until 6 March and then embark on a tour of the country.

In honour of today's journey, the BFI tweeted a short video showing what the Flying Scotsman was like to ride on when it was first built in the 1930s.