| I have told elsewhere
(The "Royal Scot" page) of how, on 8th November 1955, during
my school half term break, I travelled on 46237 City of Bristol from
Rugby Midland to Crewe, on the northbound Royal Scot. It was my
intention was to record the performance of the locomotive, by noting the
milepost timings, from which I could calculate speeds. I had travelled from Birmingham Snow Hill to Leamington Spa on 6014 King Henry VII, then from Leamington Spa Avenue to Rugby Midland on Ivatt 2-6-2T no 41285, arriving at 11.07am, giving me a comfortable connection into the Royal Scot, booked to depart at 11.24am. But during that 17 minute period, I had succeeded in dropping my stopwatch. Never mind, a quick check revealed that everything seemed to be ok and in working order. 46237 City of Bristol turned up a few minutes late with the usual 14 coach load, and we were away at 11.31am, with 7 minutes to make up. We didn't seem to be doing too well. A modest start, nothing higher than 71 mph (Nuneaton) and relatively poor running. So my stopwatch recorded that we had taken 82 minutes 24 seconds to reach Crewe, inclusive of the time lost by a p.w.slack at Norton Bridge. However, having alighted from the train, I glanced up to the clock on Crewe platform, and noticed that it had stopped. Or so I thought. It was showing 12.46pm, when according to my reckoning it was at least 12.53pm. If 12.46pm was correct, then we had run from Rugby in 75 minutes, not 82 minutes. It began to dawn on me what had happened. I had damaged my stop watch, and although it was working, it was running at the wrong speed. |
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| That evening, I
carried out extensive tests on the stopwatch, using the GPO telephone
TIM facility. The end result of which was that the watch was over
recording by 9.57 per cent. Thus the apparent top speed of 71 mph at
Nuneaton was in fact 78 mph. And that the overall time should read 75
mins 13 secs. It took some time to recalculate the intermediate timings,
since in 1955 there were no pocket calculators.
And so a replacement stop watch was purchased from the same shop as previously, Nathans, Corporation street, Birmingham. The new watch was first used on 6th December, during an afternoon trip from Stourbridge Junction to Worcester, then back to Birmingham New Street. And a TIM check of the new timings was made, and everything was spot on. |
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