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I was telling a relative about my part time job guarding the Royal Scot after it was acquired by Billy Butlin. He had been a porter at Bescot Station, and the story was that this loco had passed through Bescot after its return from America. The Americans had fitted a bell on the front of the boiler and this demolished the lights above the platform in passing. He wasn’t born till 1934 so he would not have been an eyewitness. Looking on the internet it seems the bell was fitted above the buffer bar and not to the boiler; the headlamp is also hardly above the chimney. This is just one instance, petty I know, of half a dozen recent instances where history has been distorted. That Coronation Scot has the bell above the boiler but I was told that the Princess and Coronation class locos were too large to pass through Bescot anyway.
I may have contributed to this distortion of history myself in my recent posting about Deltic under test in the 1950’s. Thinking back I can recall the black wooden fence with uprights and two horizontal bars we were leaning on about twenty feet from the track. I think what was in front of us was a Deltic shell, with a central nameplate, containing the dynamometer car, that captured my attention. The actual traction unit was to our left, but then, somebody would have thought it worth taking a photograph of such a set up and I haven’t been able to find one. Also I was under the impression that Deltic was a play on diesel/electric, but I read that it refers to the shape of the motors. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks, I do like things to be accurate.
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