SeeYou190
This is kind of curious to me now that I see the Flying Scotsman was a 4-6-2, and streamlined at that.
You are thinking of Mallard. Flying Scotsman was an A3 and was never streamlined.
And yes, I suspect that the great majority of Americans think of Thomas if 'British steam locomotive' is mentioned ... and the runners-up would also be out of the 'Thomas and Friends' pantheon.
This thread isn't about 'favorite locomotive type' -- it's about 'quick, what's the first thing you think of when someone says 'steam locomotive'. Flying Scotsman was a 'face of British steam' to those of us growing up in the '60s and early '70s ... because it was toured and promoted as such. In those days the American locomotives comparably memorable had numbers: 5632, 759, 4501, 2102, rather than representative wheel arrangements, or perhaps even classes. Again this is in large part promotion and visibility creating those things like primacy, latency, and (at the time) recency that make them memorable.*
Wasn't the 0-6-0 arrangement by far the most popular in England?
Yes, but very, very few people likely care about that --
other than that...
... Thomas is an 0-6-0, so that should have bolstered the diminutive engines up a bit.
It's not that 'diminutive' engines are preferred - it's that they are made memorable. And in my opinion, the more pervasive and ordinary a locomotive was, the less memorable or extraordinary it would likely be... until you get to service that defines a whole period of one's life, like the 4-4-0s in 'The Situation in Flushing'. And I'd argue this would be just as circumstantial for smaller power as for, say, the last few years of NKP Berks or N&W steam in service, or GTW on Detroit commuter trains, in the late days of actual commercial use of steam locomotives.
This would be kind of like saying Americans think of a PENNSYLVANIA T-1 4-4-4-4 when they think of a steam locmomotive. I just would not buy it at face value.
One of the premises behind the feasibility plan for the T1 Trust was
precisely how many people associated the T1 'wicked cool' with modern steam locomotive
once they were exposed to it. That also concerns overcoming the long legacy of lies and propaganda about what a failure the T1 was -- and we all know how Americans hate associating with perceived 'failures'.
(There are a great many people who dislike the T1 as 'toadlike' or overdone, of course; that is a different thing from being made memorable.)
There were also reasons the smaller power was disproportionately victim to early dieselization. I doubt most Americans living anywhere near a yard mourned disappearance of those 0-6-0s or 0-8-0s that kept their laundry speckled. Or could actually name you any actual class of British 0-6-0, including the Thomas prototype -- unless you count Duck, who made a point of being proud of his 'family'... but few people will think of that locomotive 'first' just because that wheel arrangement was once pervasive.
On the other hand I can't speak for what was memorable to actual British people from various 'formative' eras - we have already heard some of the 'distinctive' memories from lastspikemike's early days. I wonder if the 'effect' is distorted by the phenomenon of trainspotting over there, making classed subsidiary to catching their numbers.
*My license plate in high school had 844 in it, by choice (And I had the choice of 828, but I wasn't as much of a CNJ fan...). My briefcase and luggage have been 759 and 284 for nearly 50 years. My post office box in Englewood was 5632 and in Beverly Hills 7002...