Seldom has the story of a single, stark ’30s sports car, confected from an American chassis and a British body, gathered so much intrigue in Britain and, latterly, a world away in New Zealand
Our saga was a reversal of Carroll Shelby’s recipe for the Cobra — slotting a Ford V8 into an AC chassis, and later into a Sunbeam Alpine to create the Tiger — and it all started when Noel Macklin sold his Invicta car company to the Earl Fitzwilliam in the summer of 1933, and sought a new challenge in the concentrated world of specialised marques. As Shelby would do three decades later, Macklin chose the smooth power of an American eight-cylinder engine for his new car, which he based around the Hudson Terraplane. Legend has it that Macklin investigated the potential of the Hudson chassis in the garage of his friend, Frederick Gordon Crosby, already famous as house artist for The Autocar. Crosby would also design the handsome Railton radiator.
The name of the car came from the racing car design engineer, Reid Railton, who had worked with Thomson & Taylor inside the Brooklands Motor Course, and was responsible for the Brooklands Riley, the chassis of the ERA single-seater, the Napier-Railton in which John Cobb set the outright Brooklands lap record, and the Bluebird and Railton-Mobil Land Speed record cars for Malcolm Campbell and Cobb. Railton’s deal with Macklin was only the use of his name, famous by now in motor sporting circles, in return for a commission on sales. He had no involvement in the basic engineering.
The Light Sports Railton
The stripped-down Light Sports Railton was said to be the brainchild of Leonard Cushman, the racing driver who ran the factory in the grounds of Macklin’s home at Fairmile in Cobham, Surrey, not far from Brooklands. The original plan was for DPA 231 (the original British registration number for the car, by which it would always be known) to compete in the 1935 Ulster Tourist Trophy race on the Newtownards road course near Belfast in Northern Ireland.
This stripped-down prototype was built by EJ Newns at nearby Thames Ditton, with a skimpy four-seater door-less open body and cycle guards in accordance with the racing regulations. It was entered for Tim Rose-Richards and was given the number ‘3’ for the TT, but it would never make the start.
Perhaps shortcomings became apparent during the build of the car. The 4.1-litre Hudson Eight sat 178mm back in the chassis, which was thought to be from a previous Big Six Hudson. The fuel tank was the standard Hudson 15 US gallon (58-litre) unit and at racing speeds the car had a fuel mileage of eight to 10mpg (28 to 35l/100km), so the Railton would be stopping at least three times for fuel in the 478-mile (769km) race. The car used the standard three-speed, wide-ratio Hudson gearbox, damned by Railton historian James Fack, who pointed out that the Brooklands rear-end ratio “Would have drastically curtailed its acceleration at Ards, as well as encouraging excessive use of the weakest feature in the Terraplane’s entire makeup — the gearbox. Any three-speed car was severely disadvantaged at Ards, but one with an inherently weak second gear like the Terraplanes would surely never have survived 410 miles of manic ‘stick-stirring.” Fack pointed out that the Ford V8s with their three-speed gearboxes were two laps behind in the 1934 TT, and had to be flagged off the course!
Then there were the cable-operated, production drum brakes. They were larger and from a bigger Hudson limousine, but were narrower so were still quite inadequate for slowing a car with a maximum speed of 177kph (110mph) in a long race. Then there were the five-stud, heavy-duty wheels from the same Hudson limousine chassis. Fack noted that a tyre stop in the race would have cost track time “With 20 studs being laboriously undone and done up again, while its rivals were quickly receiving the same service from a few well-aimed blows with a copper hammer.”
So, the Railton was tactfully withdrawn from the TT and Rose-Richards drove an Aston Martin. A second Light Sports (DPL 94) was built a few months later as a more civilised version, but our saga concentrates on the original DPA 231. A week after the TT, the car was racing at Brooklands, then at the Shelsley Walsh hill climb where RRK Marker came second in the 5.0-litre class to Eddie Hall’s 3½-litre TT Bentley. In another Brooklands outing the Railton turned a lap at 104.85mph (168.7kph).
Contemporary Road Testing
The car was loaned to the British motoring magazines, and The Autocar photographer caught the Railton in flight, all four wheels well clear of the ground as it crested the Test Hill at Brooklands. Incredibly, the driver can be seen smoking a pipe during the ‘flight’. It coined the word ‘Terraplaning’ and Railton agent, Charles Follett, would make that photograph famous in his press advertising.
In his November 12, 1935 road test, The Motor tester started with verve: “From a standstill to 90mph [145kph] in 23 seconds; or to 100mph in 41 seconds; fleeting acceleration such as no other production model possesses. These are two of the outstanding performance characteristics of the new Railton light sports tourer, a close-coupled four-seater selling complete at £878. Stripped of its wings, hood and headlamps, the car is capable of touching a speed of 110mph and covered the flying quarter-mile at Brooklands at 107.14mph [172.4kph] ¦ far exceeding our anticipations and putting the car in a class of its own.”
Despite the enthusiasm of the motoring press, the Light Sports failed to find a buyer. In December 1936 DPA 231 was advertised for sale at £295! It didn’t sell. In March 1938 it was offered at £185, but it remained gathering dust at the Fairmile works until Follett had tuner RF (Dick) Oats — who had made vintage side-valve OMs competitive with overhead-cam Alfa Romeos — perform his magic for £300; reckoned to be twice the value of the car which had now covered 80,470km.
The Oats engine mods upped performance to the point where the Railton lapped Brooklands at 185kph (115mph) — 16kph faster than in standard form — and cut its climb time at Shelsley Walsh. The car had still not been sold. Perhaps it was assumed that Follett now owned it, as he was campaigning it on a regular basis. According to Follett’s Railton file, motorcycle racer Charles Mortimer expressed an interest in the car in March 1941. Mortimer had owned the Barnato ‘Blue Train’ Bentley coupe pre-war, and been delighted to sell it for £110 with war clouds gathering in 1939.
It seems that the Railton was used to tow gliders for the Fleet Air Arm late in the war, as was the Napier Railton. Late in 1948 the car sold for the first time — 13 years and a World War after it had been built! — to a Mr JB Stone in Hampstead, north London.
In a feature on the car in the April 18, 1941, issue of The Autocar, Follett was writing that his Light Sports was “The best all-round sports car available in Britain before WWII.”
An Intriguing Theory
Mr Stone must have soon tired of his stark two-seater and sold it to a dealer in the Finchley Road, which was where Peter Lumsden found it.
We are talking 60 years down the road here, and when present owner James Shand, who inherited the car from his father Rob, who bought the car and shipped it to New Zealand in the late ’40s, took it over he found a file of original correspondence relating to the Railton. But that is to jump ahead.
The first handwritten letters in the Shand/Railton file are not dated to year (presumably 1949) but the signature intrigued me — PJS Lumsden. Could it be Peter Lumsden who started racing in 1956 with a drum-braked Lotus IX, and subsequently raced a lightweight E-Type and Lister-Jaguar before hanging up his helmet in 1965? I consulted my British Racing Drivers’ Club yearbook, found Lumsden’s address and wrote to ask him if he had ever owned the Light Sports Railton. He had! Peter emailed to say he couldn’t remember anything about the Finchley Road dealer, apart from the fact that he was fond of wildfowling and had a fearsome eight-bore shotgun on the wall of his office.
“I bought the car at the end of my national service before going to Cambridge, but I soon realised that it was not a practical car for an undergraduate, so did not keep it for long. Petrol was rationed in those days so mileage was somewhat limited. It certainly had excellent performance, and I went to a VSCC meeting at Madresfield Park where it was fastest in the Speed Test.” Lumsden doubted that the Railton would have been very successful towing gliders “with its light weight and not much over the back wheels.”
He would sell the car to Rob Shand through Thomson & Taylor at Brooklands. In his first letter to Shand, Lumsden described the mechanical condition and noted; “The body is a very light four-seater, with rather skimpy back seats. There is a hood and tonneau cover, both in excellent condition. The front wings are of the non-swivelling cycle type and give excellent protection in the wet. The car is extremely reliable and had never given me any trouble. Petrol consumption depends on how you drive, because there is an accelerator pump. But I reckoned on 15mpg [18.8l/100km].
“A Mr JB Stone acquired it after the war and drove in a Gransden Lodge race. A friend of mine saw it and said it went very well and if it had been driven properly it would have been first instead of second in the race. Stone hardly used the car and I acquired it in May 1949, but as I went abroad directly afterwards and only came home in September before I went away again in October, it has only been used by me for pottering around and not for competition.
“You probably want to know why I am selling the Railton. I am studying economics up at Cambridge at the University which causes a great drain on my finances, and with the petrol I can get hold of and the cost of licensing and insurance, it is too expensive and I just can’t afford it.”
There followed a difference of opinion whether the price should be £300 (which Lumsden was asking), £200 (which was Thomson & Taylor’s valuation) or the eventual £165 that Shand paid and the car was sent to Thomson & Taylor for shipment. Thomson & Taylor had written to Shand in February 1950 advising that its valuation of the car — if it was in first class condition — would be £150/£200.
This was a coincidence of personal and national identities since Reid Railton had worked with Thomson & Taylor in the ’30s when he gave his name to the car, and the Thomson of Thomson & Taylor — Ken Thomson, a New Zealander from Rotorua who had come out of WWI with the rank of Major. He was first involved with racing driver and engineer, Parry Thomas, for some work they were doing for the Australian railways.
In our email exchange, Peter Lumsden also mentioned he had finished eighth at Le Mans in 1959 driving a 1250cc Lotus Elite, winning the 1500cc class. His favourite circuit was the Nürburgring.
The Railton Downunder
By chance Rob Shand’s son, James, who now owns the car, uncovered evidence of the Railton’s record after it arrived in New Zealand and the account of the car’s purchase — from one college student in Britain to another, aged 22, at the other end of the world.
Shand had driven a Railton in New Zealand and was aware of the performance urge from the straight-eight, so when he saw the Light Sports advertised in Motor Sport, he asked the advice of Walter Scott on how to go about purchase. Scott was a well-known Christchurch garage owner who had raced Edwardian Vauxhalls and, in 1935, imported one of the first Railton-Terraplane tourers into New Zealand. It was Scott who arranged for Thomson & Taylor at Brooklands to inspect the Light Sports and report on it.
“Weeks of waiting were rewarded with a three-page letter from Thomson & Taylor and a fee of only £10 for the work, which included a trip of 400-odd kilometres to inspect it,” wrote Shand. “Now all I had to do was find the fairy godfather with overseas funds and cash up my MG TA. The former was easy as the father of a very good friend had funds in most overseas countries, and the deposit was paid by a cheque drawn on the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople.” Finding overseas funds was a major problem when buying cars abroad in those post-war days.
The deal eventually went through, and the ship arrived in Lyttelton with the Railton in the hold. “Days then of waiting while the railways lost it in the course of a 13km journey to Christchurch and then the haggle with Customs about duty — was it of American or British origin?”
Rob Shand was not impressed with the body. “It was a bitter disappointment. It was not the attractive, original beetle-back with domed and moulded cycle guards, but a rough, slab-sided box with two old aircraft seats and flat guards made of light steel sheet — but never mind, I had bought it to GO, not to look pretty. Its acceleration was breathtaking and its exhaust note indescribable from the original Brooklands silencer.”
NZ Racing Debut
First event for Rob and the Railton in New Zealand was a standing kilometre sprint on Taeiri Plains near Dunedin at the end of November 1950 — but they replaced the regular battery with a motorcycle unit to cut weight and the wiring came adrift. Rob had to abandon his run.
With the Railton repaired, Rob’s mate, Lisle Lester, did the run in 32.13 seconds for second place in the three to eight-litre class behind George Smith’s famous GeeCeeEss V8 special on 28.16 seconds.
“George was a great character, having been in racing since 1919, and I remember his response when I asked him that evening after the sprint if he knew of any good Hudson motors around Auckland. With a characteristic jab of his plump forefinger into my chest and a twinkle in his eyes, he said ‘Listen sonny, there just aren’t any good Hudson motors!’”
“The most important event in the 1951 calendar as far as Canterbury was concerned was the Centennial Road Race on a road circuit in Mairehau, an outer suburb of Christchurch. The circuit was on sealed roads with a lap of about four kilometres. The Railton was on scratch for a 20-mile [32km] handicap race for Sports and Saloon cars, giving six minutes, 15 seconds to the limit man in a side-valve Morris Minor who had almost completed his first lap, and was in sight behind me when the flag dropped and ‘The Old Girl’, as Charles Follett used to call her, shot away to gather in the rest of the field. It was an exhilarating 20 minutes as one by one I sighted the front runners and gathered them in, all except Frank Coster’s Singer 9 roadster, and made fastest time at 60mph average — all in all a very satisfying outing after 10 years or more of enforced retirement.”
Next event was the New Zealand Championship Beach Race on Oreti Beach south of Invercargill. Rob and Lisle drove the Railton on the 1227km round trip from Christchurch.
“To those of you who have never raced an open-wheeler on the beach, it’s no game for girls with nice complexions or tender bottoms, particularly at 100mph-plus, but it’s thrilling and requires its own particular skills and technique. Unlike Mairehau, this was a scratch race and promised to be a tough one, so it was a case of using head instead of foot as some of the opposition were very fast but not reliable, and it paid off with a comfortable third place behind George Smith in the GeeCeeEss and Alec Edwards in his supercharged TC MG, the same car Sybil Lupp drove to second place at Wigram in 1950.”
The Christchurch Star reported that — “Shand’s performance was a noteworthy one last week because his car, although in the 100mph class, cannot be regarded as a racing car. It is a sports tourer which was built and used extensively in competition as a ‘works’ car by the Railton firm in England in the late ’30s.”
A week later and the Railton was on the inter-island ferry en route to two-mile Paekakariki Hillclimb north of Wellington, “¦rising from the sea to over 1000ft [305 metres] with a spectacular sweeping bend at the finish.”
Shand was fifth fastest, and left the car there for the Ohakea airfield race the following weekend. In practice with the XK120s of Gibbons and Roycroft, there was an ominous crunching noise which turned out to be six studs shorn in the crown-wheel-and-pinion carrier, and Shand was a spectator watching Smith winning again after a hard race with Tom Sulman’s 4C Maserati and Ken Tubman’s K3 MG.
The competition calendar was a busy one in 1951 and the following week, with repairs effected, Shand was ready for the start of the splendid 1.6-mile (2.6km) Governor’s Bay hill climb between Christchurch and the Bay. Sulman was fastest in the Maserati and Shand won his class and took second fastest time overall. The Christchurch Star reported that, “Once again the young Christchurch driver, Rob Shand, showed that he is fast approaching the top flight in car competition. He was one of the select few who broke two minutes for the course.”
Hillclimbs and sprints
The following weekend, Shand and the Railton were at the South Island Championship Hillclimb at Three Mile Hill, a classic climb on tar-seal through a pine forest.
“Showers made the road slippery and some do-gooding busy-body went to the traffic cop in attendance and had the climb stopped. I was so furious that words failed me for once, as I was lying in a strong position.”
Next weekend was the shingle hill climb at Briggs Gully for the South Canterbury Championship on the Saturday, and back to Christchurch for a standing quarter the following day, but bad-choice new tyres handicapped the Railton at both events.
In early April, Shand invited Lisle Lester and his wife to accompany him in the Railton to the sprint event in the Fryatt Street wharf area in Dunedin, collecting a speeding ticket (for 70mph, or 113kph) on the way.
“Preparation for the event involved removing the spare wheel, surplus seats and windscreen, guards and lights and putting some of our very secret fuel in the one-gallon [4.5-litre] sprint tank. The ‘Old Girl’ was well warmed-up after the 250-mile run down and we had also arranged for Lisle to have a run.” They did well. Rob had done 17.02 seconds and Lisle had done 17.03 seconds. We were both overjoyed, mostly for the ‘Old Girl’ which, after 16 years of hard work and the minimum of attention, had taken nearly a quarter of a second off her original time of 17.4 seconds for the standing quarter as per the road test in The Motor of November 12, 1935. We gained the Otago Championship Sprint Title and Blue Ribbon.”
Next up was another run up the Governor’s Bay climb, where Shand shaved 1/100th of a second of his previous time for second FTD to Les Moore, in the 2.9-litre P3 Alfa Romeo which Nuvolari had driven to win the 1935 German GP on the Nürburgring.
The race on South Brighton beach near Christchurch was on May 26. “I took a few precautions about keeping my bespectacled face free of sand, and gained second place in the Trophy Race behind Hec Green’s single-seater Wolseley special and in front of Jack Tutton’s XK120.”
A sprint and a hill climb over the winter kept the Railton aired, but the young Shand was now involved with study and university exams, and his next serious race was back on Brighton beach in December 1951. In the open 15-mile (24km) race the final order was Smith in the GeeCeeEss, Frank Shuter in the Edelbrock, Tutton in the XK120 and Shand.
“I was completely blinded by sand. I’d started wearing spectacles and a face visor on my skid lid with only an aero screen on the car, but as the beach was very wet I was soon covered in sand and blinded, and ended up wearing nothing over my eyes and just crouching behind the aero screen.”
In the 30-mile feature race Smith and Shuter ran one-two again, but Shand was third ahead of Tutton’s XK120.
“Again the V8s had beaten me, but there was clear evidence that there was no substitute for litres, especially American ones. A lot of the cognoscenti who favoured small fussy highly-stressed engines were constantly deriding our vulgar monsters, chiefly because they were usually in front. It was always a source of special pleasure to be able to have the better of the much-lauded XK120 Jaguars, as I have always considered cost as a fact of performance and XK120s cost three times more than I had paid for a 15-year-old car which could also carry four persons, not two.”
In the sports car race at Mairehau, in 1952, Shand was put on scratch with two XK120 Jaguars — “But the starter had a funny idea of scratch as I was placed five car-lengths behind the front XK120. This was done because on the narrow road the limit cars were already circulating, so we were placed nose to tail at the side of the road. I was damned cross at this blatant unfairness, so resolved to ‘do’ the 120s at flag fall, making good use of the ‘Old Girl’s’ 60mph [96.5kph] bottom gear. I certainly ‘did’ them, much to the consternation of the starter, officials, slower cars and the two XK120s. I took them both in bottom gear and was several lengths ahead of them by the first corner, but the oil seal in the back axle had failed — so did the brakes and I carried on up the escape road and I finally finished 14th.”
March 1952 and a class second and fifth FTD on the Canterbury Car Club Port Hills climb, then a flying quarter-mile in Dunedin slowed by battery problems.
From Race to Road
“The dawning of 1952 had brought me to the realisation that if I was going to continue serious motor racing, the old Railton would have to be replaced by a serious and more suitable racing car — competition was becoming tough. To this end, I decided the Railton would retire and be rebuilt as a four-seater sports/touring car. I commissioned Johnson & Smith in Christchurch to build a wooden-framed close-coupled four-seater, alloy-covered body with a 24-gallon [109-litre] rear slab tank and vertically-mounted spare wheel. The front of the car to the scuttle was left original. A new dash was fitted and a door provided on the passenger side. The work carried on while the motor was completely re-conditioned, and after about 15 months the ‘Old Girl’ was again on the road with a mohair hood and side curtains.”
By April 1955, Rob Shand was coping with a growing family and a new house and offering the Railton for sale, writing to Ron Roycroft — “The car has been completely rebuilt from the chassis upward. The motor has been completely done over and genuine American Hudson spares fitted wherever necessary. It has only done 6000 miles [9656km] since then and no competition. A complete new close-coupled four-seater open body has been built and very complete all-weather equipment of the best quality fitted, the hood and side-screens are made of silk-mohair.
“There is a new 23-gallon fuel tank, aero screens, tonneau cover and good tyres. There are various spares and the all-up weight is just over 23cwt [1168kg]. The steering ratio has been raised to two turns from lock to lock and the weight distribution improved. She runs perfectly on pump fuel with the present compression ratio of about seven to one.
“The most difficult job for me is to get put a fair price on her. The receipts for the body job are available and the engine spares and overhaul cost over £100, as you can imagine with American parts. I have a figure of £750 in mind, but you may think that is a bit high even though there are no four-seater sports cars of comparable performance available today.”
Shand was hoping that perhaps Roycroft would take the Railton in trade on a pre or post war American saloon, but was retrospectively delighted that Roycroft was not interested in a deal. As the Shand family grew, the Light Sports stayed parked, unused until Rob had an accident in the family Citroën in 1969 and the Railton was brought back into service.
There would be more racing, now with son Robert at the wheel, running faster than his father and winning two vintage races at Levels Raceway in 1970 ahead of the experienced Ray Archibald in an SS100.
Races at Ruapuna and a hill climb on Patmos Avenue in Dunedin followed, but power was ebbing and the car was sent to Ian Jones at Jones Motors in Fairlie, a famous old firm that had prepared the ’20s Sunbeams for CWF (Bill) Hamilton. The transformation was reflected in equal FTD at the Chelsea Walsh hill climb in Auckland and a good run at Dunedin’s Three Mile Hill in January 1979, where the old Railton beat three XK120s in the process.
Sadly, Rob died in 2002 and son James eventually took over the Light Sports, and is fettling the gallant old charger back to its former verve with a view to competing in vintage events. James enjoys the best of all worlds, with a 50-acre vineyard near Burnham, south of Christchurch, bottling under the Straight Eight Estate label as a link to the Railton, and he feeds the workforce south of the railway at Gobstoppers on Antigua Street in Christchurch.
The vineyard made a splendid backdrop for Terry Marshall’s photographs and, of course, a vineyard is always a favourite venue for your Humble Servant¦
Words: Eoin Young Photos: Terry Marshall
