Lots of railways had wierd locos during the early years. There was belief that other designs might be better. There were lots of experiment with Dean and Churchward before the Churchward standards came along. They looked odd to many when first built.Nice model.Don

Not just in the early years, either - think Paget, LNER 10000, LMS 'Fury', etc.  Some people are very critical of Dean's experimental designs but forget that Churchward made quite a few mistakes before settling on his 'standard designs' - think 'Kruger' for example.

A magnificent beast! The comparison with the Dean Single is most illuminating.

 

Did you built it all from plastikard?

Only the valve gear is plasticard!!  The body and chassis are brass, using very similar construction techniques to my 'Queen' locomotive.  With the long square tanks it was very simple to cut out the main components from 10 thou (0.25 mm) brass sheet.

A lot of the experiments were Dean and Churchward working together. I do think the Kruger wins the prize for the ugliest loco might make an interesting model?Don

I agree that the Kruger is so ugly that it becomes attractive as a model concept.

Unfortunately, I think that with all those nests of springs, peculiar saddle sandbox, combustion chamber, etc., it would be in the 'too difficult' box for me.  A big attraction of early Armstrong and Dean designs is that they are fundamentally simple

I've got to have me one of these little monsters........ The only difficulty is justifying it on my proposed Great War era layout...

Nice model and description, thanks for sharing.

I could hardly believe this machine, when I first read about it in John Gibson's book.  I built this fairly simple model just to work out how it might have looked.  It may have been a failure but it provided Dean with some important lessons, which led eventually to his famous 'singles'.

The sad thing is it was the method of attaching the two trucks that was probably a failure and not the locomotive generally (which was sadly untested), however with such a small proportion of the machine's weight available for traction she would have been as slippery as wet grass!

Yes, William Dean did seem to have some odd ideas about bogies but it all came right in the end!  I think historians have been a little unkind about Dean - we forget how much was unknown when he came to office but he learned a lot from his mistakes and was clearly well-respected by Churchward. (who also learned from his mistakes)

Interesting about Gibson... while he was undoubtedly there and had the overalls as you might say, it seems to me that he needs to be read with a considerable pinch of salt handy. He definitely has a weakness for these tales of coverups and conspiracies, and one suspects that sometimes it was more of a matter of no-one wanting to talk about errors any more than I like to recall any errors I might have made in my working life. As an example, if you go through his details about the King dimensions, the numbers simply do not add up to what he says they do. The same is also true of some of his "should have builts", again often his concept simply wouldn't have made the weight restrictions.

Your analysis re valve gear and wheel spacing appears to me very well observed. I suppose the thinking was that as long as its got 19.5 tons (or whatever Dean's limit was) on the driving wheels it will have the same traction whether its towing a bogie or a tender behind, which is logical enough until the water tanks are nearly empty!

Thank you for your comments, Jim.  There is nothing like trying to build a model, for finding out what does and doesn't work! 

Another amazing thing is that, by all accounts, the Pearson 4-2-4 Tanks did work on the Broad Gauge but, in their case, the width of the gauge left room for well tanks, which would not cause such huge shifts in the centre-of-gravity as they emptied

Mike - there is something about bogie Singles that 2-2-2s do not have.  "Balance" perhaps.  The NG/SG Lord of the Isles has balance.  My F Moore The Locomotive magazine print from around 1900 shows an elegant machine.   Eric.

Thank you for commenting, @Annie.  I am very sceptical about the Twining drawing, which was produced around 1940.  I suspect he may have been influenced by the bogies on the Lehigh valley 4-2-4T. which was still extant at that time:

The valve gear, as shown in the re-built version of No.9, will not fit between a 7' leading bogie and the driving wheels.  It seems unlikely that they would have gone to the trouble of altering the arrangement during the rebuild, especially as it was re-built again, a little later, to match the layout of the 'Queen' class. 

This article referred to by @Miss Prismin the Imaginary Locomotives thread, is incorrect in stating that this engine used Joy's valve gear.  As the 'Engineer' article referred to above clearly states, it was Stephenson gear.  Joy did visit Swindon and saw this engine being built and there was a plan to use Joy's gear on the second, never built, version. 

The whole thing was an experiment by Dean to try and find a way of accommodating the valve gear when using larger cylinders.  Eventually, he adopted Stroudley's arrangement, with the valves located below the cylinders.  The real solution, of course, was to use outside cylinders, as Churchward realised.

Mike

One fact that seems to have escaped mention is that when Dean built this 'narrow' gauge 4-2-4T, seen by David Joy in July 1882, there was a former B&ER broad gauge 4-2-4T still running in original tank engine form as GWR 2005 (formerly B&ER No.12)

This adds strength to the argument that Dean was exploring whether the broad gauge design could be carried over to the 'narrow' gauge.

According to RCTS Part Two, No.12 had a total wheelbase of 25' 1" and 7' 6" diameter driving wheels.  As GWR No 2005 this engine was not withdrawn until December 1885.  There is a photograph in the BGS Magazine BROADSHEET vol.48 (Autumn 2002)