LNER Class A4 2509 Silver Link


Silver Link was the first London and North Eastern Railway A4 Class locomotive, built in 1935 to pull a new train called the Silver Jubilee.

History

Silver Link made its inaugural journey from King's Cross on 29 September 1935. It reached a speed of, breaking all previous records. The record provoked the LNER and their chief rival the London, Midland and Scottish Railway into a highly competitive speed war, each attempting to outdo the other by building ever faster locomotives. The main protagonists were Sir Nigel Gresley, LNER's chief mechanical engineer, and his counterpart at LMS, Sir William Stanier.
Silver Link was so named after a line in a poem about love by Sir Walter Scott, which reads:
Allocated to Kings Cross shed, it was withdrawn from service on 29 December 1962 when the East Coast Main Line express services were taken over by Deltic diesel locomotives. It was not preserved after withdrawal and was broken up for scrap at Doncaster Works on 7 September 1963, on the same site where it had been built nearly twenty eight years earlier.
Two instances of the Silver Link nameplate are on display at the National Railway Museum, York, UK.