Longest Name given to a steam locomotive.

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karlrestall
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Longest Name given to a steam locomotive.

Post by karlrestall »

Hi all,

I was asked this morning a question that featured in a newspaper which was;
'What is the longest name given to a steam locomotive'? or words to that affect. Now I have done a bit of research and have found that the longest official name was 'The Green Howard Alexandra, Princess of Wales's Own Yorkshire Regiment' (59 Letters) given to an LNER V2 class locomotive. However this was shortened and not actually cast on a name plate. The second longest which I have come up with is 'The Rt Hon Viscount Cross GCB GCSI', (28 Letters) which I believe was cast onto a name plate. Can anyone beat these? The name can be from any company and any locomotive either existing or scrapped. I am not including spaces or grammatical symbols such as hyphens, apostrophes and full stops.

Regards

Karl
Last edited by karlrestall on Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Tom Quayle »

The Snapper The East Yorkshire Regiment The Duke of York's Own (51) off an LNER V2 is the longest I could find.
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Percy Main
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Post by Percy Main »

How about: THE PRINCE OF WALES'S OWN REGIMENT OF YORKSHIRE?

Ah, but you said 'steam' locomotive. I think Deltics should be classed as honorary steam locomotives.
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Post by Sir Nigel Gresley »

By "longest", I presume you mean number of letters, otherwise I believe 60013 wins.

As for 60809 and 60835, their names were, respectively, "The Snapper" and "The Green Howard", the remainder of the oft-quoted titles being merely a subscript below the actual name. If this criterion is used, 46100 wins by miles, as its nameplate reads "Royal Scot" and then there is the subscript (in very similar format to the two V2's) "Prior to conversion, this locomotive etc, etc ....tour of America...blah, blah..." (Sorry, can't remember the exact text)
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Post by x568wcn »

Sir Nigel Gresley wrote:By "longest", I presume you mean number of letters, otherwise I believe 60013 wins.
If you count spaces as a letter, then 12 and 13 are the same length!
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Last edited by x568wcn on Thu Oct 18, 2007 6:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by x568wcn »

In the UKs Daily Mirror, there's a question and answer section, and todays 'Answer' concerns the question of this thread!

The Answer given by Tony Massey of Sheffield is;

One of engineer Sir Nigel Gresley's Class V2 Locomotives carried the name The Green Howard, Alexandra, Princess of Wales's Own Yorkshire Regiment.

Another member of the class was named The Snapper, The East Yorkshire Regiment, The Duke of York's Own. I think the latter wins by a short head!
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Post by Dave B »

Mark,
Outside of the LNER I think 'Royal Scot' 46137 'The Prince of Wales's Volunteers ( South Lancashire )' would come close
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In contrast

Post by 52D »

In contrast the shortest LNER locomotive would surely have to be GNU
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Post by giner »

x568wcn wrote:
Sir Nigel Gresley wrote:By "longest", I presume you mean number of letters, otherwise I believe 60013 wins.
If you count spaces as a letter, then 12 and 13 are the same length!
Hey, that's cheating. Domininion of New Zealand, indeed. See graphic above.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Old proofreaders never die, they just have colon problems now and again.:D
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