another post got me thinking....

Agreed. Can't imagine the LNER or any other railway not calibrating one to be as accurate as possible.

 

If you look on Wiki there is a graph of the timings showing the predicted speeds. The thing that stands out to me is the lack of a peak, implying that, if the timings were right, speed was still climbing. For it to work and be accurate, the curve needs a peak. OK, Wiki is not the most reliable source but good enough for the purpose of illustrating this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GWR_37...ruro#mediaviewer/File:20130102_3440_graph.jpg

 

The most interesting thing about the two timings is that they are 8.8 from Rous-Marten and Kennedy must have been 9.0. Is it known whether Kennedy had a 5th second stopwatch I wonder. If so the two readings were remarkably consistent: at the limits of the technology available to them. Rationally though the English speed records were all about who had the best hill, and must be regarded as being of very limited value. Clearly the German loco would easily have had the legs of the A4 had they been run side by side.

 

someone pointed out that C J Allen (another highly respected train timer) got 97.3 for FS rather than the spike of 100 that the Car recorded....it's not me on about it at all! I'm merely reporting on what others have said, I don't have an opinion as such, I am prepared to trust persons more expert than me (and I'd respectfully doubt that isn'r anyone posting here)

 

If the stopwatch was only timing to 0.2s, and (presumably) incremental times were being recorded, then any specific quarter mile time could be in error by as much as 0.4s. That's roughly 5mph at those sorts of speeds, before you then add in any error in quarter mile posts. (For example, if they vary by perhaps 10 yards either side of the true position, then again you get another distance error of up to 20 yards, which is again equivalent to about 5mph). Measuring a very short interval of time over a short distance will inevitably mean big error bars.

How fast did CoT go? We'll never know, but the probable answer might be somewhere around high nineties, give or take 3 or 4 mph. That holds out the possibility it did go over 100mph, but also means the real figure might be nearer the middling nineties. I'd quite happily settle on 97mph +/- 3. Either way, fast for the Edwardian period, but certainly nowhere near proof of being the first over 100mph. As for that great hagiographer OS Nock: he was writing sixty-odd years after the event, with no opportunity to validate either the chronometer or the milepost positions, so he has exactly the same evidence to go on as the rest of us, and that evidence is inconclusive. Whatever his reputation, you can't conjure certainty out of insufficient data. My own feeling is that OSN wanted to believe that CoT had achieved 100mph, and convinced himself that the data supported that view, without considering the equally valid viewpoint that the data may have been insufficient to support that view.

Tom

 

Ah, CJ Allen. He timed 777 Sir Lamiel on a then record run into Waterloo in SR days. Many years later in a RW article he called into doubt his own timings and wondered if it had been a record run at all. In the light of that, one wonders how accurate his 4472 times were.

 

Good word.

 

Well I thought it was apt for OSN! He's rarely critical about anything railway related, which makes me doubt his objectivity in this specific case.

Tom

 

Slightly odd playing with numbers there James...
Here are the actual possible recorded times in seconds, with conversions to mph.

time speed
8.2 109.8
8.4 107.1
8.6 104.7
8.8 102.3
9 100.0
9.2 97.8
9.4 95.7

Rous-Marten got 8.8 seconds, which really means more than 100mph and less than 104.7
If he was a 5th of a second out then it goes out to more than 97.8 and less than 109.8

Kennedy got 9.0 seconds. If he was using a 1/5 second stopwatch then that means more than 97.8 and less than 102.3.
Again if you allow for a 5th second error that means between 95.7 and and 104.7.

From the figures alone the most likely result is that they did the quarter mile somewhere between 8.8 and 9.0 seconds, agreeing with both recorders results - in other words between 100 and 102.3mph. The further away you go from that the more unlikely it gets, but the numbers support 101 +/- 3, not 97 +/- 3. Of course if Kennedy only had a one second or half second stopwatch then all his number does is providea general corroboration.

And if the notorious platelayers hadn't been there to give Clements an excuse to put on the anchors they'd probably have piled up on the next bend and broken everyone's bloody necks, and we'd be talking about the 1904 mail train disaster...

 

Sent me to the bookcase for the dictionary.....

 

Rous-Marten did not publish any information about the run until a substantial time after the event. Were the subsequent times after the '8.8' ever published because, without them, the timings have no real meaning? The inference from any reasonable speed/time graph based on Rous-Marten's figures was that speed was still increasing so why stop there? As for the second person with the stopwatch, do we actually know that he had such a thing (as distinct from a simple timepiece) and did he have any credibility as a train timer? If I suddenly told the world that I had been on a train which had gone faster than any other based on one 1/4 milepost time, the ill-informed might believe me but others would probably cast serious doubt.

 

After the 8.8 quarter mile Driver Clements braked sharply because there were platelayers on the line.

 

It's fair to question his experience and aptitude for recording, surely? No more than questioning a financial consultant debating on railway matters…!

It does matter who records and reports what data because that's part and parcel of the authentication process. Giving more weight to one reading that another, Rous-Marten's higher speed and data can be examined and debated but that of the postal worker cannot because (as far as my books allow this evening and as far as I know) it was reported in a newspaper article and recorded that way but the timing log itself hasn't survived.

Therefore we work on the report given in a newspaper and whether it was accurate for that run.

However the rest of railway history disagrees with you and OS Nock on this point. If the two accounts were in any way accurate enough to stand up on their own then CoT's record would stand in the record books.

As it is, nobody disputes it was a fast run: the question is how far can it be authenticated and the answer to that is it cannot be reasonably authenticated. The evidence is not good enough to make it a record and no matter how much anyone repeats Cecil J Allen this, OS Nock that, neither of them were around at the time and were themselves working on second hand sources and not first hand account.

How can two independent timings, using basic human sight, stop watches (for which Rous-Marten's it is implied, was measured differently to the other run - i.e. the use of that particular type of stopwatch was different to the timepiece the postal worker had) and not accompanied by any other data be considered exacting proof of a 100mph run?

To that end, was there any precedent prior or after Truro that the City 4-4-0 class had the steaming capability and tractive effort to attain and maintain such a speed? I ask out of interest.

I don't think there's any dispute that the dynamometer car readouts are more accurate than the manual recording; so how on earth does that disprove Scotsman's 100mph figure…?

Absolutely, but then Gresley's Pacifics - and those that followed (yes, even Thompson's) were capable of sustained high speeds, not just the one off record breaking speeds. SNG's record post-war, Silver Link's debut, Mallard's world speed record and the reputed 90-100mph runs all by Gresley and Peppercorn Pacifics are all the result of locomotive development stretching back to Ivatt's time. All testing and speed runs carefully recorded with the NER's dynamometer car, which is why LNER enthusiasts and historians have so much data to work with when writing their own articles. They can back up their claims because the data is still around and detailed enough to examine and draw reasonable conclusions.

 

no mere Postal Worker at that period would have had a stop watch of any kind or the wherewithal and free time to riding trains to time them. I suggest that the tag "postal worker" has been thrown into the mix at some time to muddy the waters.

 

Any conceivable argument that you have put forward on the CoT episode has just gone out of the window

 

Are you aware that Truro made her disputed 100mph run on the Ocean Mails express? It was primarily a post train so the idea of a postal worker being on board is not fanciful at all.

I would be astonished if postal workers of the time didn't have time pieces of some form given their job.

In any event it is recorded in history and we know the name and profession of the gentleman who made the claim and the type of train he was on.

You see, I'm not disputing the gent in question was on the train nor that he gave that account, only that we should be wary as to the accuracy of that account given his job and unknown quantity in terms of timekeeping.

 

This thread reminds me of the medieval theological debate about how many angels could fit on a pin-head; do we know? No. Do's it matter? No.
Even before CoTs "record" run, several claims of 100 mph running had emerged from America, but were discounted here for exactly the same reasons that doubts remain about CoTs performance- no accurate on-train speed recording equipment.
In fact, the 100 mph threshold was only of interest to those countries which used the Imperial system of measurement- mainly the then British Empire and the USA. The only country which possessed accurate on-train speed recording equipment at that time was France, but they were not interested in miles per hour. 160.93 Kph dosn't have quite the same ring!
On the positive side, whether it was 100 mph or slightly less, the story got the GWR some good publicity and ensured that an interesting loco was preserved, which would have otherwise certainly been scrapped.

 

You're quite right about 160.93. Many people mention that 18 201 in Germany is plated for 100mph. It's not - it's plated for 160kph.
In the greater scheme of things you're right about CoT's run but irrespective of which camp the protagonists are in, I think it can be agreed that it was a very fast run indeed no matter what the stop watches said.

 

Was he a common or garden postal worker with a precision timepiece and plenty of time to look out of the window along the way? He could of course have been the PMG but you are doubting his evidence based on that description of "Postal Worker"

 

It doesn't matter how strong this postal worker's evidence is, unless he had GPS it still won't be strong enough whether he was a common or garden postal worker or not.