Pegler gained his Private Pilot Licence aged 17 at Radley, and spent much of his time chasing LNER expresses along the East Coast Main Line.
Accepted into Jesus College, Cambridge, to study law,[3] the outbreak of World War II meant that he was instead commissioned into the Fleet Air Arm, training to fly Blackburn Skua fighter/dive-bombers.
[3][1] Post-war, he was again accepted into Jesus College, Cambridge, but after a year his father became ill. Resultantly, he returned home to run the family business, Northern Rubber, having been made a director of the firm on his 21st birthday.
[4] As a result, in 1959 he was on the footplate of the LNER Class A4 Sir Nigel Gresley as it broke the postwar steam speed record by hitting 112 miles per hour (180 km/h) south of Grantham.
[4] Preserved trains first ran over a short section in 1954, but after a diversion to avoid the new Ffestiniog Power Station reservoir, the line was fully reopened to passengers in 1982.
[1] He spent the next few years spending large amounts of money having the locomotive restored at the Doncaster Works, and then persuaded the British Railways Board to let him run enthusiasts' specials.
However, the train ran from Boston to New York, Washington and Dallas in the first year; from Texas to Wisconsin and finishing in Montreal in 1970; and from Toronto to San Francisco in 1971: a total of 15,400 miles (24,800 km).
By the end of the Flying Scotsman tour in 1972, the money had run out and Pegler was declared bankrupt at a cost of £132,000 in debt, with the locomotive in storage in U.S. Army Sharpe Depot to keep it away from unpaid creditors.
Pegler then took up acting, gaining his Equity trade union card by playing Henry VIII in a theatre restaurant in St Katharine Docks.
A man of some personal modesty, Alan's adventures with steam started young when in 1928, aged just 8, his father took him to see the Flying Scotsman on its first non stop run from London to Edinburgh.