Fowler's Fury: LMS 6399 by I.F. Carney

This book was acquired in Heffer's in Cambridge as a birthday present from from one of my daughters. It is interesting to note that this major bookshop has relatively few railway books for sale. This one caught my eye and the price was not too excessive (the other daughter present purchased the new New Naturalist title Scotland for me).

The book contains some superb photographs, but none of the locomotive on test. As is fairly well-known this experimental locomotive combined an extremely high pressure water tube boiler with a relatively simple three-cylinder compound engine based on the Royal Scot chassis. On the initial run a tube burst on the approach to Carstairs station which killed the representative of the Superheater Company who was on the footplate. Professor Lea of Sheffield University reported on the strength of the tube and to suggest reasons for its failure.

A very long review appeared in Backtrack, 2013, 27, 126: it only allocated one (out of a possible five) star and was presumably written by Adrian Tester as it is signed "APT". The review presents a very clear picture of the high pressure circuit and the cause of its extremely early catastrophic failure, but condemns the text under review for being flawed whilst noting the "many interesting photographs".