Wonderful to see and hear - thankyou!
The 200th Anniversary of one of Britain's most significant inventions - not of the railway as that already existed, but of the concept of using railways as public passenger and goods transport.
I'm guessing at least some the paintings were contemporary advertising art-work.
Note the "speed whiskers". That motif was widely used in the 1930s to perhaps early-1960s, last appearing I think on the Diesel Multiple Unit Trains and single-vehicle "railbuses" introduced by British Rail for suburban and branch-line services.Their top speed was generally a modest 75mph.
Actually those steam-hauled crack express trains did not often exceed that either, certainly not over very long distances, but they were still by far the fastest form of transport apart from flying.
The Coronation Scot was a London, Midland & Scottish Railways service - London (Euston I think) - via Birmingham and what is now called the "West Coast Main Line", to Glasgow.
Its most significant rival was the London & North Eastern Railway's Flying Scotsman service, some hauled by that company's own, distinctively stream-lined A4 Pacifics such as "Mallard". This was London (St. Pancras) - Edinburgh non-stop, on the now-named "East Coast Main Line".
Despite the maritime name most of both routes is really quite some way inland - you don't see the sea 'till you're nearly there yet! (Central London is about 20 or 30 miles in from the North Sea, for a start.)
Those names were of the trains - not the locomotives save only for the A3 Pacific 4472, subsequently named "Flying Scotsman".
(I do wish journalists and others would learn the difference, so stop calling locomotives, "trains"!)
Not to be outdone the Southern Railway tried what it called "air-smoothing", slab-sided rather than the curvaceous LMS and LNER streamlining, around its Merchant Navy and West Country class Pacifics.
Rigorous tests showed streamlining had no significant effect on efficiency or performance of a conventional steam-locomotive, below about 80mph - unusually fast even for the expresses of the time. It was more for publicity than engineering, and made maintenance more difficult by being in the way - though British locomotive designers anyway never copied the European and American habit of untidily draping the auxiliary fittings all over the external surfaces.
Speed now? The fastest steam-hauled London - Glasgow or Edinburgh services took at least eight hours non-stop (with a half-way crew change using a specially-fitted corridor connection between the locomotive and leading coach). The fastest London - Edinburgh trains now complete the 400 miles in a little over four hours, I think with two intermediate stops, with long stretches of cruising at over 100mph.
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I may be wrong but I think the music was used for that famous British Transport Commission / Royal Mail publicity film, Night Mail; with its commentary being the poem by W.H. Auden.
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Incidentally as we celebrate the 200th Anniversary of the first public passenger hauling, albeit to show the possibility rather than as a service, between Stockton and Darlington, we should not forget that it was not the first steam-hauled train. Trevithick had already built a steam locomotive hauling coal wagons on a private colliery line in Wales, about 20 years previously.
