Romantic names of rail travel consigned to history

Thirty years ago the Royal Scot train took less than five hours to travel between London and Glasgow. These days the quickest service on the route takes half an hour longer – if you are lucky.

Thirty years ago the Royal Scot train took less than five hours to travel between London and Glasgow. These days the quickest service on the route takes half an hour longer – if you are lucky.

But speed and efficiency are not the only things to have been sacrificed. Now it seems that the romance of the railways has also fallen by the wayside.

Apart from the more pedestrian journey times, the name of the Royal Scot itself has been consigned to history.

Britain's rail companies have been gradually – and quietly – dropping the famous names which used to adorn their fastest and most comfortable trains.

The disappearance of the Royal Scot has been accompanied by the demise of Britain's longest-distance service, The Cornishman, which ran 700 miles from Dundee to Penzance.

Others to have disappeared include The Devonian, which ran from West Yorkshire to Paignton, and the Brighton Belle, a scheduled service between London and Brighton, the Armada, a business service linking Leeds with the West Country, and the Devon Scot, from Aberdeen to Devon. But the demise of the Royal Scot will cause the most concern among those who are nostalgic about railway style as well as substance.

The forerunner of the Royal Scot first left its southern terminus on 1 June 1862. The name was not officially bestowed on the service until 1927. In its heyday in the 1930s, it comprised 15 coaches and the total length of the train including the steam engine was about 230 yards. During the journey, the fireman was charged with feeding more than five tons of coal into the furnace, while the well-to-do – only the prosperous could afford the tickets – lunched in comfort in the restaurant car.

The present services run by Virgin are more prosaic, with little to differentiate one train from another. These days, the food is basic, to put it politely. Virgin prefers to give services a flight number – although National Rail Inquiries is confused by the concept.

On the east coast main line, however, another national institution lives on. At 10am every day, one version of the Flying Scotsman leaves London for Edinburgh and another heads in the opposite direction. And while they are not up to the standards of the French TGV, they are still substantially quicker than they used to be. In 1888 it took nine hours to complete the 393 miles between the two cities, but this included a half-hour stop for lunch at York.

When services began in 1862 they were typically referred to as the "Special Scotch Express" or "Day Scotch Express" in timetables. Some time later they acquired their current name. It now applies both to the service and to the first steam locomotive to be given the name, which was built in Doncaster in 1923.

In 1900, new coaches were introduced which included restaurant cars and after 1928 it was even possible to have a haircut on the service.

If truth be told, however, there is little substance to the famous name these days. It simply refers to the train which leaves the Scottish and English capitals at 10am.