Engineering report on 'Flying Scotsman' failures

[John Ashworth]

Flying Scotsman has been under repair for some time now, with new faults constantly appearing, so NRM commissioned two reports. They can be found on the National Railway Museum documentation page, specifically at:

http://www.nrm.org.uk/aboutus/~/media/F ... Report.pdf and

http://www.nrm.org.uk/aboutus/~/media/F ... otsman.pdf

They seem to suggest that the locomotive has been pushed to the limits of its performance too much, and that in future it should be used more carefully and not "thrashed" - a lesson which might be pertinent to many heritage railway societies operating old locomotives.

[Aidan McCarthy]

Interesting reports, from them it looks like the root cause is that they replaced the boiler with one than ran at a higher pressure and bored out the cylinders to give around a 33% increase in TE and they seemed surprised the frames cracked and went out of alignment due to the extra force as they were not designed for it.