Flying Scotsman

Nearly all (or all?) steam locos built by the Big 4, including Flying Scotsman, the other Gresley Pacifics, the Duchesses, Kings, Merchants Navies etc were treated as renewals, costs being debited to P&L as may have been adjusted by transfers in any year to or from the Renewal Fund. "rebuild" was not an accounting concept although it appeared on some worksplates. Although one sees comments about this treatment being mandated by legislation, I have never found any legislation that does this but am happy to be corrected (mandating an accounting treatment which involves somewhat subjective inputs would be tricky) and I think it was controlled by the chief accountant. As Tom says, in theory one could identify a "betterment" component to go to capital expenditure but I suspect in the majority of cases that was put in the too much effort category. Of course for most of the Big 4s existence, it suited the directors to be able to say to the shareholders that they could not pay any greater dividend as they were distributing all of their distributable profits (which was true). It is also worth bearing in mind that one driver of the Grouping was to achieve economies so in theory the combined railway groups should not have needed to increase the capital invested, although the Big 4 had plenty of demands for new non-renewal outlays in technology and infrastructure, new modes of traction etc.

 

Isn't this a version of the "Evening Star" fairy story?

 

Following on fro

Following on from this a friend at the NRM has sent me this interesting photograph of Flying Scotsman's weigh shaft. Not only is it stamped 103 and 4472 but if you look carefully at the first 4 of 4472 you can see that it has been stamped over the number 1. This clearly suggests that the weigh shaft has been with the loco since construction at Doncaster in 1922

Thought this might be of interest

Peter