Night Talisman

A new photograph from Ian Simpson

55019 ‘Royal Highland Fusilier’, a Class 55 Deltic, waits for the right away at York with the Up Talisman, the 16.00 from Edinburgh to King’s Cross, on 23rd December 1975. Beside her on the platform stands a trolley, the kind spotters would have used through the day, now waiting for its own turn on the overnight parcels workings.

Look closely and the Deltic’s skin gives her away. The outer panels are far from perfect, rippled along their length, and the platform lights at York catch every one of those ripples and throw them into relief. This is not a locomotive kept for show; she has earned that surface over years of hard mileage, and on a December evening two days before Christmas, under the ordinary glare of a station’s lighting, the wear reads as plainly as anything else in the frame. She stands ready for the off, the platform otherwise given over to whatever a big station keeps to hand at that hour: a trolley with nowhere else to be until the parcels vans needed it, and a quiet that only settles once the day’s ordinary traffic has thinned out.

There is something particular about a large station in the run-up to Christmas after dark. The through workings still matter, perhaps more than at any other time of year, but the crowds that fill a platform at midday are gone, and what is left is the machinery of the railway going about its business regardless of the date: a named express waiting its call, a trolley parked for a service that will run long after the passengers have gone home. The Talisman was not sentimental about the season. It ran because the timetable said it should, and a Deltic in reasonable order was there to work it.

That December, 55019 was allocated to Haymarket in Edinburgh, where she had been based since May 1973, and the York working fitted a pattern rather than standing apart from it. Earlier that same month, on the 6th, she had worked the down Talisman out of King’s Cross at 16.00, the same named train run the other way. The Deltics were being used to their maximum at this time, and a locomotive shuttling between King’s Cross and Scotland on named expresses through December 1975, right through the run-up to Christmas, was simply what a Class 55 in traffic looked like that winter. There was no spare capacity in the diagram for sentiment either; if a Deltic was rostered, a Deltic worked.

The Deltics were being pushed this hard because they were still, at the end of 1975, doing work that nothing else on the East Coast Main Line could quite take from them. But the writing was already on the wall. The prototype High Speed Train had broken the world speed record for diesel traction some two years earlier, a demonstration that the Deltics’ successor already existed and already outran them. When the production HSTs arrived in 1978, they began the end for the Class 55s on these workings, and with them went the casual carrying of parcels and mail that a service train like the Talisman had long provided as a matter of course, the very trade that trolley on the platform was waiting to serve. 55019 herself had entered service in December 1961. She was withdrawn on 31st December 1981, and survives today, preserved by the Deltic Preservation Society.

Why this photograph?

What stays with you in this photograph is not the named train, nor the record already broken elsewhere on the network that would eventually catch up with her. It is the ordinariness of the moment: a Deltic standing under platform lights with her flanks showing every mile she has run, a trolley waiting for a job that has nothing to do with passengers, two nights before Christmas, at a station going through a routine it had performed a thousand times before and would, before too many more winters had passed, never perform in quite this form again.

Available as Prints and Frames

Browse the Night Talisman print and framed editions, or see more of our Deltics Class 55 photography.

The photograph

• Locomotive: Class 55 (Deltic), 55019 ‘Royal Highland Fusilier’
• Location: York
• Date: 23rd December 1975
• Working: The Up Talisman, 16.00 Edinburgh to King’s Cross
• Also in frame: A platform trolley, awaiting the overnight parcels service
• Photographer: Ian Simpson

Copyright Notice

This photograph is the copyright of Ian Simpson. 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.