Duchess of Atholl - EDP2

It’s the name of a locomotive, but it was also the title belonging, at one time, to Katharine Marjory Stewart-Murray (1874 – 1960).

Katherine became Duchess of Atholl in 1917 when her husband John Stewart-Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine, succeeded his father as the 8th Duke of Atholl.

Born Katharine Marjory Ramsay and known as the Marchioness of Tullibardine from 1899 to 1917 when she became the Duchess of Atholl, she was immortalized as a steam locomotive along with the rest of the Duchesses.

Designed by Sir William Stanier in 1937 for LMS Railways and originally called the Coronation Class, this superb locomotive set a British rail speed record of 114mph on one of its first trips.

The original design included streamlining cowls, but these were later deemed un-necessary at speeds under 75mph. They received much criticism from the maintenance crews and were later left off - thanks to the power of the rail unions!



Watching this little engine chug around the track……yes I DID used to get a thrill from watching them….. where was I? ah yes, watching this engine chug along, you had no idea what it would have taken to make the full sized iron beastie move.

Some data kindly stolen from SouthernSteamTrains.com should leave you in a sweat just reading it:

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The engine would burn 1 ton of coal for every 40 miles run.
The boiler required 2 tons of coal to be burning in the firebox when working hard.
The tender carried 10 tons of coal (clever people can work out how far she could travel before refueling).
Fire crews had arms like tree trunks and sore pinkies at the end of each day.
The boiler carried 5000 gallons of water – that’s British Imperial gallons – not the short measures doled out in the United States.
She would evaporate 45 gallons of water per mile! The fire crew evaporated only slightly less than this.
She weighed a little over 161 tons and took up 73’ 10” of track
Bridges and tunnels less than 13’ 1” height would not have survived her passing beneath them.

All in all she was a work horse of immense power and strength, yet she was much stronger than many larger engines and therefore she was quite economical.



These engines were built to beat the competition from other rail companies before nationalization stepped in to cripple the country.

How many Duchesses were built? I don’t know, perhaps someone can enlighten me? but I do know that three survived:

Duchess of Sutherland which is entirely roadworthy after a complete rebuild recently.
City of Birmingham
Duchess of Hamilton

The rest of these amazing vehicles have been melted down into paint tins, razor blades and those annoying little sprung clips that you find on cheap picture frames.

Now you have the chance to actually own two Duchesses!

Duchess of Atholl and the Duchess of Montrose.

Both are in immaculate nick and are so delightful to look at I don’t think I want to sell them now……….



Miss Atholl was built around 1948 or 1949 and is part of an original boxed set in fabulous condition. Mr Hornby Dublo announced in 1939 that he was making this locomotive, but it didn’t appear until the end of ’48. Obviously he fell in love with her too and only parted with her when a new bit of stuff showed up.

Miss Montrose came along a little later in 1953 or 1954. I’m a bit shaky on the details as I hadn’t hatched yet and my history teacher didn’t cover this kind of information. I think he had a fetish with the ancient Greeks!

If you like trains and are the excitable type who loses bladder control, then I advise you NOT to click on this link: southernsteamtrains.com/duchess.htm



Oh yes! What's in the first box?

The Train Set is identified as EDP2

The box is approximately 19" x 11" and is in amazingly good condition with barely a mark on the outside of the box and a only a slight wavy distortion of the lid.

Contents:

Duchess of Atholl 4-6-2 Locomotive and Tender (#46232) in excellent condition. Only a few minor paint chips visible.
Coach - LMS 1st and 3rd class corridor #4183
Coach - LMS 1st class #4193
(both coaches are in very good condition, with no damage to report)
8x large radius curved rail
2x full straight (one is a terminal rail)

The controller is missing from the box. I don't know what happened to the controllers from these boxes, but the overall outfit has two controllers that have been mounted and won't fit into the boxes.

The locomotive cardboard end support is missing as is the loco cover, instructions and warranty papers.


Back in to the cardboard box for me now to see what else I can find.

More Track Photos

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Isolating rails and switches



















Diamond crossings - both LH and RH















Quarter Rails and one Eighth rails

Track - Lots of Track

At the zenith of my railway addiction, my bed had to be mounted on wheels so that it could be rolled out from under the layout board when required. The layout board occupied a space of 13 feet by 3 feet and didn't permit much else to take place in the room. Why should it? I didn't care about much else!....we;;, that's not strictly true, but......

Now if school had taught mathematics as it applied to designing track layouts, then I would have received top grades. I was hopelessly lost in sketchbooks and graph paper trying to squeeze the most dynamic design from the one hundred and fifteen feet of track I possessed.


The track is all listed on an MS Excel spread sheet as everything else will be, once it has been unwrapped, scrutinised, documented and photographed.

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The Collection

The disease started when I was around six years old and I was presented with my first train set - a small German TRIX 3-rail set. It was mostly plastic, but the locomotives moved like the proverbial shit off a shiny shovel. In fact they moved way too fast for realism and always rolled off on the curves.......but isn't that part of the fun?

A few years later I was presented with another train set, this time a second-hand Hornby Dublo 3-rail outfit. Now, I believe there was an ulterior motive behind this, in the shape of a father who was besotted with steam trains, but didn't want to admit he liked playing with them.

Hornby Dublo turned out to be the 'Bees Knees' of collectors train sets and it didn't take many seconds to work out why.

It ain't plastic - it's absolutely solid!

I traveled miles with my father. Trundling down country lanes in rural England, visiting old men in tiny cottages, who had decided to part with their own lifetime collections. Some of these places were better than museums! They had decided to a man that they couldn't take their trains with them to heaven and with no-one to whom they could leave them, decided to send them to new caring homes. Sad....really sad.

.....and now it's my turn. Yes, I am a sad git for being soft in the head about trains in the first place, but now it's my turn to pass them on. I don't feel that I am going to pop my clogs any time soon, but my own lifestyle has changed to such a degree, that the chance of ever having the space and time to lay the whole shebang out on a board once more is remote to the nth degree.

Now it's someone else's turn to enjoy it. If you are interested in buying it as a lot, let me know. In the meantime I will set about the task of cataloging and photographing everything and slowly laying it out here in the ether until it's complete.

.....and then i won't want to part with it!