From the Large to the Small...

Hi Super,

Yes the Golden Arrow was a label given to a special express service just as the Flying Scotsman was. A big misconception is that the service was named after the train and indeed there is the Flying Scotsman loco and there was a Golden Arrow loco as well, but they were not the only locomotives to run the services of the same name. It's a very English thing and there were numerous special services such as those, the Brighton Belle, the list goes on and on.

But back to your original question yes it is an English design, called the 'Battle of Britain' class, that particular one is modelled as the original streamlined loco which was one of the English railway companies competitor to the 'A4' (aka Spencer) streamlined loco. See picture below;



The class was called 'Battle of Britain' as a lot of the engines were named after famous Battle of Britain and wartime characters such as Winston Churchill and airfields like Tangmere as well as the squadrons that flew out of them and which took part in the war. Later in their lives a lot of them had the streamlining removed so they looked more like the Flying Scotsman style, this was primarily a pragmatic decision as it was much easier to service the engines without all the streamlining in place which would need to be removed to carry out maintenance. Here's an example;



Just for the record there was one other famous type of streamlined locomotives which were the Coronation class (I'll post a pic of an example below of each type) these were typically named after English cities or famous lords or ladies, again these eventually lost their streamlining as well for the same reason as the Battle of Britain class.





Hope that helps?