Starlight Express - Railway Enthusiast Connections

Railway Enthusiast Connections

• Both Rev Awdry, the writer whose Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends books were an original inspiration for the musical, and Richard Stilgoe, the musical's lyricist, are known as significant railway enthusiasts, and there are a number of oblique references in the musical
• The name "Starlight Express" was taken from a late 1950s-early 1960s British railway service which ran overnight between Glasgow and London. In the days of fixed and regulated fares it unusually offered special cheap prices, and was only run at weekends and holiday times. It only lasted for a few years. For a number of reasons, its special routing and its use of locomotives unusual on part of the route, normally two steam locomotives at a time when these were disappearing from main line service, it regularly featured in the news and photograph pages of contemporary railway enthusiast magazines, which Awdry, Stilgoe and others would have read in their younger years. – Others claim that the name "Starlight Express" was taken from Edward Elgar's piece of music by the same name.
• The Really Useful Company, Andrew Lloyd Webber's production company, takes its name from various references in Awdry's books to Really Useful Engines and the like. Awdry always capitalised the catchphrases which were devised for his books.
• Control is a railway organisation in Britain, based at the area head office and behind the scenes, which coordinates the various signalboxes up and down the country and gives out information. Control was an invention of the old Midland Railway, based in Derby, in around 1900, and the concept spread nationally.
• Rusty is named after one of Awdry's locomotive characters, Rusty the Diesel, which is in turn a parody of a real brand of small diesel locomotives (of identical appearance to the one drawn in Awdry's books) manufactured by the Ruston Company, Lincoln, in the 1940s–1960s. They had a prominent "Ruston" manufacturers badge/nameplate across the front of the locomotive which would be noticed by children.
• Greaseball is inspired by Union Pacific locomotive designs, and exhibits characteristics of 1950s-era Elvis Presley.
• Pearl earned her name from Pullman, who name their carriages after precious stones, flowers and plants. 'Pearl' is also the name of a car on the Orient Express.
• Electra, in Greek mythology the daughter of king Agamemnon, has been the name for a number of electric railway locomotives over time.
• AC/DC, as well as a reference to sexual preference, refers to the power supply to electric trains. AC is Alternating Current, normally high voltage and supplied by overhead wires, and common on main lines, while DC is Direct Current, a more traditional approach, often supplied by additional rails alongside the tracks and common on local lines and metro systems. Locomotives have to be constructed to use one or the other, but a few are specially made to be able to operate on both systems. Once known as AC/DC, with the rise of the alternative usage they tend to be known as Dual Voltage nowadays instead.
• BoBo is a generic technical description of locomotives with a bogie at each end, each having two axles and separate motors. If it has three axles at each end it is known as a CoCo, etc.
• Belle (e.g. Brighton Belle) is a long-standing name and individualistic spelling for trains which contain luxury coaches provided by the Pullman Company, an independent organisation which provided its own carriages and attendants in their distinctive brown and cream livery from Victorian times until the 1960s. These carriages had individual names, the majority of which were girls' names, especially those with a classical reference, and as there was a fleet of several hundred at any one time almost all common names were used; several of them duplicate character names in Starlight.
• Krupp, in addition to being a German armaments manufacturer, was one of the principal German locomotive manufacturers over many years.
• Ruhrgold is a parody of the train service named Rheingold, which ran for many years from Hook of Holland in Netherlands to Basel in Switzerland, the bulk of the journey being alongside the River Rhine in Germany. Although not a Pullman train it had many of the exclusive features of such. – The "Rheingold" is the supposed gold treasure of the Nibelungen in the Rhine. For the musical, presumably the Ruhr was substituted for the Rhine because the German city of Bochum, where the show is played, lies in the Ruhr, an urban area which derives its name from the river of the same name.
• British electric locomotive "Starlight Express" was given the name at the opening of the musical in a special ceremony at London Euston station. Fittingly of the BoBo type, number 86231, nearly 20 years old when it received the name, it ran from Euston to the north on main line trains for another 20 years before being replaced.
• Song titles which play on the railway theme include; "He Whistled At Me", "U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D.", "Light at the End of the Tunnel", "Rolling Stock", "No Comeback" and "Hitching and Switching".