Thanks for that. Seems that The Flying Scotsman locomotive was built for a life of promotional touring.
Didn't know the Flying Scotsman went on a post-retirement tour and I find it typical that the PM of the day thought this relic could be good for promoting British exports. Who would have wanted some outmoded, expensive lump of iron?
This was a time when Concorde was being built, you would have thought UK Plc would have had better goodies than The Flying Scotsman to send off to America.
Different things happen when objects get to be in museum world. If anything there is to learn from the story is the importance of getting stuff into 'museum world', then there are the collaborations, tours and opportunities to shift the merchandise.
I wonder how well the marketing and tour would have gone had 4477 'Gay Crusader' been the one to be spared of its fate on Barry Island (where all trains went to die).
What is also interesting is that the service was called 'The Flying Scotsman'. Yet most people would be quite insistent that it is the locomotive, not the service that the name refers to. I wonder why this is not something done a bit more extensively today. There is no single loco that is synonymous with the channel tunnel service. They could have one 'poster child' loco and make it sound special, to market channel tunnel trips a bit more 'romantically' than how it is done currently with faceless no-name locos.
Didn't know the Flying Scotsman went on a post-retirement tour and I find it typical that the PM of the day thought this relic could be good for promoting British exports. Who would have wanted some outmoded, expensive lump of iron?
This was a time when Concorde was being built, you would have thought UK Plc would have had better goodies than The Flying Scotsman to send off to America.
Different things happen when objects get to be in museum world. If anything there is to learn from the story is the importance of getting stuff into 'museum world', then there are the collaborations, tours and opportunities to shift the merchandise.
I wonder how well the marketing and tour would have gone had 4477 'Gay Crusader' been the one to be spared of its fate on Barry Island (where all trains went to die).
What is also interesting is that the service was called 'The Flying Scotsman'. Yet most people would be quite insistent that it is the locomotive, not the service that the name refers to. I wonder why this is not something done a bit more extensively today. There is no single loco that is synonymous with the channel tunnel service. They could have one 'poster child' loco and make it sound special, to market channel tunnel trips a bit more 'romantically' than how it is done currently with faceless no-name locos.