Tornado

Officially endorsed by the A1 Steam locomotive trust, Tornado is the official account of the building of Britain's first main line steam locomotive for 50 years, how it took a team of volunteers 18 years to raise more than 2-million to build it and its international headline-grabbing debut on the main line, with a royal visit thrown in for good measure. The book looks at the history of the A1 class and the East Coast Main Line which they were built to run on, the man who designed them, Arthur H Peppercorn, the preservation movement which evolved from a handful of volunteers saving a cash-strapped steam railway in central Wales in 1949 to the point where it could build a main line express passenger locomotive, and how the dream of building Tornado came to fruition stage by stage at Darlington. Tornado is lavishly illustrated with both archive and contemporary photographs bringing the story up to date.