Kings Cross Deltic

A new photograph from Trevor Ermel

Class 55 Deltic 55014, The Duke of Wellington's Regiment, pulls away from King's Cross in late afternoon sunshine on Sunday 3rd August 1975, working the 17.00 to Newcastle, train 1N27. At the station's loco stabling point behind it, an unidentified Peak sits ready for its own turn north, having brought in the 11.30 from Leeds earlier that day.

There is a particular quality to a London terminus on a Sunday afternoon in high summer: fewer trains, longer gaps between them, and light that by five o'clock has turned low and gold enough to catch the glass and ironwork overhead. Cubitt's train shed rises over the platforms much as it does today, its ribs throwing shadow across the roofs of the stock below. Nothing in the frame is hurried. A Deltic pulling away at full effort fills the space with sound and diesel haze even as everything else, the waiting Peak, the platform itself, seems to hold still for a moment before the next departure.

By August 1975, 55014 had been a Gateshead engine for more than two years, allocated there since May 1973, and workings like this one, a King's Cross departure for the North East, were exactly what the class did every day of the week. Two days earlier it had worked north on the 11.45 from King's Cross, and within a week of this photograph it would be off its normal diagram entirely: a fractured casing on its number one power unit, discovered as a coolant leak, sent it into Doncaster Works for an unclassified repair, the kind of running maintenance that kept the fleet's twin Napier engines turning through the 1970s. None of that trouble shows here. In this picture the locomotive is simply doing the job it was allocated to do, pulling away with a Sunday evening express while, behind it, a Peak of unrecorded identity waited its own turn for the road north.

The scene itself was already living on borrowed time, though nothing in it announces this. The Great Northern suburban electrification then being planned for King's Cross, and the wholesale rebuilding of the station's surroundings that came with it, would eventually replace the sprawling layout visible here with something smaller and simpler; the loco stabling point where the Peak sits, and much of the steam era arrangement still governing how engines and stock moved around the throat of the station, would not survive it. Cubitt's train shed and a handful of buildings to the east are, today, almost all that remain of what this photograph shows. The locomotive at the head of the frame had less time left than the station around it. 55014 had entered service in September 1961, one of the class that took over the East Coast's top expresses within a few years of build, and it would be withdrawn in November 1981 and cut up the following February, the fleet itself gone from King's Cross not so very long after this photograph was taken.

Why this photograph?

What stays with you is the ordinariness of it: a Peak readied for its next duty, a Deltic doing exactly what a Deltic was built to do, and a Sunday afternoon at King's Cross that felt as though it would carry on much as it was. The trainshed still stands. Almost nothing else in this photograph does, and that is precisely why it is worth looking at now.

Available as Prints and Frames

Browse the Kings Cross Deltic print and framed editions, or see more of our Deltics Class 55 photography.

The photograph

• Locomotive: Class 55 Deltic 55014 "The Duke of Wellington's Regiment"
• Location: King's Cross
• Date: Sunday 3rd August 1975
• Working: 1N27, the 17.00 King's Cross to Newcastle
• Also in frame: an unidentified Peak locomotive at the station's loco stabling point, having worked the 11.30 Leeds to King's Cross (1A20); Cubitt's Train Shed
• Photographer: Trevor Ermel

Copyright Notice

This photograph is the copyright of Trevor Ermel. It is reproduced here by permission and offered as fine art prints and framed editions by Memories of Motion.

The image may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed, transmitted or used in any form, in print or digitally, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder. All rights reserved.