King Charles Poses on the Footplate of the Flying Scotsman

More than 100 years ago, the Flying Scotsman was introduced as the first steam locomotive on the fledgeling London & North Eastern Railway, and eventually became an icon in British culture after it became the first UK locomotive to reach 100 mph in 1934. To celebrate its centenary, King Charles III visited Pickering Heritage Railway Station Monday, where posed for photos on the locomotive’s footplate. During his visit, he spoke to volunteers who run the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, a heritage rail line that has ferried tourists around the region for the last 50 years.

While aboard the Flying Scotsman, the king spoke to Chris Cubitt, the train’s driver, but wasn’t able to stick around for tea. “He’s a regular because he has been here before when he opened the station in 2000,” Cubitt later told a reporter. “He’s on his way to Scarborough now through my village. I invited him in for tea, but he said he couldn’t come.”

The king arrived in Pickering on the royal train, which was pulled by the Flying Scotsman into the heritage railway station. In 2013, he told an onlooker that he has loved trains since he was a child, and he is said to ride in the cab along with the conductor when he can. He has also made multiple visits to the National Railway Museum in York, where he has celebrated milestone anniversaries for other famous trains and railways.

During the event, the king spoke with Lord Peter Hendy of Richmond Hill, the custodian of the Flying Scotsman, and Judith McNicol, the director of the National Rail Museum. The Flying Scotsman went into regular service in February 1923, and it got its name because it did a daily mail route between London and Edinburgh before it was sold in 1963. When British Rail ended its steam locomotive lines in 1968, the Flying Scotsman was the last one to run, and its final journey was documented in a BBC program. In 2004, the railway museum did a fundraising drive to save and restore the Flying Scotsman, and it became a working museum exhibit in 2016.

Later on Monday, the king was greeted by schoolchildren as he visited shops in the Pickering town square, including a chocolatier and a butcher shop that sells produce from the Duchy of Lancaster, the estate that belongs to the British monarch. Before ending his visit, he stopped by St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church, where he looked at their collection of medieval wall paintings, accompanied by Reverend Gareth Atha and Kate Giles, a professor at the University of York.

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