"Bring back the Britannias I say !! "

You might not have appreciated the relevance of my comment, perhaps your far too young !

The Britannia locos were the only Pacifics ever to run scheduled services on Great Eastern metals.
The iconic LNER Pacifics were too heavy and therefore none could be transferred to Stratford
when the merger that produced the big 4 came about.
Gresley did produce some new 4-6-0 locos for the GE [ B 17's 'Sandies' or 'Footballers' ] but whilst they
were fine performers they weren't totally suited to some of more testing lines found on the GE.

The arrival of the lightweight B.R. Pacifics - the Britannias - in 1951 designed by a former LMS man [!!]
and which were a development of Bulleids [ who joined CIE ] S.R. Pacifics totally re-wrote the
time table between London + Norwich, and they were a fantastic sight going non-stop through
Manningtree.
The lions share of the first batch of these locos went to Stratford and a large number went to the Norwich
shed out of the second batch.
There are those with slightly distorted memories who would claim that they were as fast as the timings today,
but that isn't correct, the Class 90's timetabling is consistently faster. Ah well - we can but dream !

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