Railton Drophead Coupe

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The man behind the Railton car was not in fact Reid Railton as might be expected, but his friend Noel Macklin, an Australian-born adventurer. Born in 1886, his father was a prominent barrister, the family moving to England when he turned 25 in 1911.

A sportsman through and through, he pursued a career as a professional Jockey, tried his hand at Brooklands racing a Mercedes and became a member of the England Ice-Hockey team. A Captain in the Royal Horse Artillery, he had a distinguished WW1 but was badly wounded in France and invalided home in 1915 after which he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and served with the Dover Patrol.

When the war was over, he decided to start making cars, his first effort arriving in 1919 in the form of the Eric-Campbell light car. When this venture faltered a year later, he produced a new model named the Silver Hawk, a project that also hit the rocks early on, but featured an attractive square-sided radiator, the design of which was used to good effect in his next, and much more successful enterprise in 1925 – the Invicta.

Taking advantage of a variety of proprietary engines, principally from the Henry Meadows concern, the Invicta went on to be immortalised by the Low-Chassis ‘S’-Type, its rakish bodywork and low stance setting the design template for most sports cars of the early 1930s. Examples of this rare beast now change hands for many hundreds of thousands of pounds, but at the time, the great depression began to bite and production had all but ceased by late 1933, Macklin selling the business to Earl Fitzwilliam.

It wasn’t long before the lure of the car business became too great and Macklin used Reid Railton’s reputation as the technical director responsible for producing the wonderous Napier-Railton and Malcolm Campbell’s successful Land Speed Record cars to market his new machine. Railton received a healthy royalty on each car and had a hand in its design, but it was really Mackin’s idea and facilities that delivered the first Hudson-powered Railton-Terraplane in 1934.

The Railton-Terraplane was an Anglo-American machine, using the basic Hudson Terraplane chassis clothed in light-weight aluminium coachwork. Its attractive radiator was the work of the artist F Gordon Crosby fronting a razor-edge bonnet very much in the mode of Macklin’s Invicta.

Prices started at just £499 and the car offered a hitherto unheard of performance, especially in its price bracket. Sammy Davis reported in The Autocar that "the performance of this car has to be experienced to be believed" with 0-60mph figures of under 10 seconds for the standard offering.

Hudson soon dropped their Terraplane model (after which Macklin's car became simply known as the Railton), introducing a new, more powerful 113bhp model called simply the Hudson Eight. Its 4,168cc straight-eight was even better and the chassis lighter still. Railton increased the number of body options by simply approaching a wider range of coachbuilders, including Motorbodies, Coachcraft and Carbodies, as well as Biggleswade-based Berkeley Coachworks as seen on this lovely Drop Head Coupe in the sale today.

By 1939, Macklin had become engrossed in the production of torpedo boats designed for an altogether different purpose, selling the Railton Company to Hudson Motors Ltd of Chiswick who carried on manufacture for a brief time pre- and immediately post-war.

It is understood that the first owner of this fine looking Berkeley-bodied DHC was Ken Hamprall, a garage owner form Retford. A photograph on file dated 1949 shows that it was still in his ownership at that date, a note indicating that it had a six-cylinder engine fitted at this time. It subsequently fell into the hands of another Retford resident, Syd Bartack, who changed its colour from blue to maroon. By now, a more appropriate 1937 straight-eight Hudson engine had been installed.

Bartack kept the car for a long period, passing it on to a Mr Burnett in 1981 who prepared it for the Paris-to-Peking Rally although we understand that in the end it never took part. Twin side-mounts were added along with a number of other modifications, most of which were reversed by its next owner, John Biggs, who acquired the car in 2003. Invoices on file from this period include an engine and gearbox overhaul, a rewire, attention to the clutch, new axle bearings and seals and a new hood and dashboard.

It finally passed into the hands of the vendor to add to his small collection of cars in 2008. Sadly on offer to due ill health, the car has seen little use over the last few years. Offering performance equal to (if not better than) a similarly bodied Bentley, Alvis or Lagonda, this Railton is on offer at a mere fraction of the cost of these alternatives, is VSCC eligible and retains all the raffish charm for which this marque was so well known in its day.