Thank you Mikkel.  From my own reading, it seems that Gooch was very much a man who led from the front.  There are plenty of records of his 'hands on' approach to sorting out the problems of Brunel's unsatisfactory engines.  There is also the story of how he and Brunel spent a night in the engine shed, sorting out the draughting of North Star, which greatly improved its performance.  The infamous Dr Lardner had asserted that air resistance restricted the maximum speed of the engine to about 30 mph but the improvements to North Star soon proved him wrong!

I'm just coming across Dr. Lardner in both Red for Danger by LTC Rolt and "GWR in the 19th Century" which I picked up from the Talyllyn bric-a-brac shelves based entirely on being better educated for your posts, Mike!

8 minutes ago, Lacathedrale said:

I'm just coming across Dr. Lardner ....

Another of Dr Lardner's pronouncements, on hearing that Brunel was proposing to build SS Great Western for the 3,500 mi (5,600 km) transatlantic passage to New York, was that: "it was perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making the voyage from New York to the moon... 2,080 mi (3,350 km) is the longest run that a steamer could encounter – at the end of that distance she would require a relay of coals."

Lardner also wrote 'The Locomotive Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated', 1840, which can be downloaded from Google Books.  I have not actually read the text but found the series of illustrations of Stephenson's Patentee engine and tender (starting on p.385) of considerable interest.  I had searched for a full copy of these in several other books but many internet books do not have the plates scanned properly.

5 hours ago, Mikkel said:

Dickens apparently referred to Lardner as "The Prince of Humbugs".

Attributing a boiler explosion to lightning does seem to fall into the 'humbug' category!

"an attempt to meet Brunel’s virtually impossible specifications."

Its interesting isn't it. There's nothing particularly unusual, even these days, about a prospective client coming up with utterly unrealistic specifications, but a competent supplier should work out a way to agree a deliverable product. In those days, I suppose, with the whole business of heavy engineering being so new, perhaps it was more difficult. I doubt Brunel was an easy client too, but oh to be a fly on the wall for the discussions of the actual locomotive designers. Did they have grave doubts, or did they really believe - or hope -  their interpretations of the specifications would make for useful locomotives?

I well recall a situation in my IT career. I worked for a central IT department, but the divisions of the organisation had complete power to purchase their own systems. The IT manager of department X put together a concept and specification for a new system that on paper looked as if it solved all sorts of problems, but in practice was clearly going to be impossibly complex and nightmarish to run. Somewhat Brunellian really! Anyway the in house team put together a proposal with their normal external partner that discarded all this horrendous complexity and proposed something that would actually work. Meanwhile ICL (you can tell this was a long time ago) put together a proposal that met the specification closely and won the contract. At the centre we were awaiting with great interest to see how on earth they were going to make this confection work. At this point ICLs clearly highly competent technical sales people stepped in. They 'worked with' the customer to make some 'minor changes' to the design which actually totally discarded Dept X's IT manager's castles in the air, and replaced it with something that was very close to the proposal the in house team had worked up, with a few fancy features that were of little benefit or disadvantage,  but made it look as if it had some relation to the original concept. I've always admired their superb customer management, and tried to emulate it...

3 hours ago, JimC said:

"an attempt to meet Brunel’s virtually impossible specifications."

I think you make a good analogy with IT procurement.  So often, the difference between serving a small number of clients and one for thousands of users is completely ignored and the system falls flat on its face when overwhelmed.   In the case of Aeolus, smaller driving wheels, new cylinders and valve gear made it into a useful small engine, rather then a grossly inadequate express engine.