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About this blog

I'm mulling over a supplement to my GWR locomotive development book.
New sketches I prepare will appear here (in small size).  Comments and corrections on the original (be nice!) and suggestions for content in the supplement welcome.
 

If you are planning a model of any of the locomotives featured in this blog you are very welcome to contact me and I'll see if there's anything I can do to assist you in researching for your model. 

 

https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/An-Introduction-to-Great-Western-Locomotive-Development-Hardback/p/14507

 

 

 

Entries in this blog

GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR 1392/1393 Class 0-6-0T (ex Cornwall Mineral Railway)

An interesting class, not least because they were significant as being the basis of the design of the 1361 and 1366 classes.   In their original form the locomotives did not look much like this, being side tanks with no back to the cab and intended to be used in pairs operated by a single crew. They were built by Sharp Stewart for the Cornwall Minerals Railway. The designer is a little obscure. Its apparently credited to an F. Trevithick.  Francis Trevithick, son of the great pioneer,
Smaller Absorbed Line Sketches

GWR 666 Class (ex Alexandra Docks & Railway or Brecon & Merthyr Railway, ex ROD, ex Inland Waterways. Kerr Stuart Victory Class)

The 'Victory' class was a class of ten built in 1917 for the Inland Waterways and Docks dept. Post war they were sold off by the Railways Operating Department, mostly to collieries. There's a detailed history here at Planet industrials.    The ADR bought two of these from the ROD. They had outside cylinders and were quite powerful locomotives. They were numbered 666/7 on absorption. They received a moderate Swindon rebuild. Another had been purchased by the Brecon & Merthyr. This l
Smaller Absorbed Line Sketches

ex P&M Brush built 0-4-0s 795 and 921

Powlesland and Mason were not really a railway as such. They provided cartage and locomotive haulage on the trackwork of the Swansea Harbour Trust, which also owned its own locomotives. At the grouping they had nine 0-4-0ST from five different manufacturers. These two, built in 1903 and 1906, were among the last steam locomotives built by the Brush Electrical Engineering Co. This is the same Brush company, give or take a few mergers and acquisitions, that was and is a significant builder of dies
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR No 34 0-4-4T (1890)

One of a pair of small 0-4-4T constructed under Dean, its believed for branch lines with heavy curvature. They were superficially similar in concept to the ill-starred 3521 class, but considerably smaller, and like the 3521s went through a good number of changes in their early years. They started life in 1890 as 0-4-2 saddle tanks, with the same layout of much shorter spacing between the driving wheels than between the trailing drivers and the trailing wheels. In 1895 they were altered to the fo
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR No 92

No 92 was one of five small 0-4-0STs, superficially rather similar in appearance, but which were not treated as a class.  With one exception they were late 19thC Wolverhampton reconstructions of older locomotives, and by the end of their long lives probably retained few original parts.  The first of the group was no 45, built in 1880, which was a new engine, albeit given the number of a Sharp Stewart built locomotive withdrawn a very few years earlier. It had the odd feature of a cab that w
Barry Railway Locomotive Sketches

Barry Railway D Class

I've rather struggled with this one. There were only four of them, and they were all built by one builder. How difficult can it be? Well, one source of confusion was that I had 4 drawings, one Barry weight diagram, two GWR weight diagrams and a distorted photo of a drawing by Trefor L. Jones, whose work is generally excellent, but I think may have been struggling with some of the same issues. They were contradictions all over the place. I also had few photos, and all of those were front 3/4 view
Rhymney Railway Locomotive Sketches

Rhymney Railway K Class 0-6-2ST/0-6-2PT

These were a version of the J class with a larger bunker, but I found more subtle differences than I expected. Again its very heavily indebted to the excellent WRRC volume on the Rhymney. This sketch represents a locomotive rather earlier in its career than the J class sketch, with the rather unusual long brass number plate.   Note that this one has Ramsbottom safety valves rather than the pop valves on the J. There was a horrific accident with one of these locomotives where a fit
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR 1741 (655) Class

Enthusiasts often refer to this Wolverhampton built class as the 655 class, but the GWR usually described them as 1741s. Thirty-two were built from 1892. They were essentially similar to the earlier 645 and 1501 classes, but were just a little larger with longer overhangs front and rear. The bunker was actually the same size as the 1501 bunker, so the extra three inches of overhang presumably provided more room in the cab. Again they were built with T class boilers. They were numbered rather ecc
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR/WR 15xx Class (1948)

I was mulling over the design of the (to me at least) strangely appealing 1948 15xx. It was a pure GWR design, and it appears from the NRM drawings list that it was actually on the drawing boards as early as 1944. As Cook tells us it was designed as a "24 hour shunter", not needing to be serviced over a pit: a worthy aim, but rendered largely obsolete by the early 350HP diesel shunters that were being introduced at the same time. I've seen an interesting comparison made between the GWR 0-6-0PTs
JimC

JimC in GWR Locomotive Sketches

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GWR Locomotive Sketches

Dean's Larger Tank Engines

This is something of a followup from discussion in another Blog entry,  https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blogs/entry/24891-gwr-no-34-1890/ and is also relevant to this one. https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blogs/entry/24922-gwr-3521-0-4-2t-and-0-4-4t/. As I said, I'm beginning to further appreciate what a weird and largely unsuccessful bunch Dean's larger tank engines were, and what a contrast in style they were from the smaller 6 wheeled engines, conventional, successful
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR 9 and 10 Dean Experimental Single Wheelers

These were Dean prototypes. Superficially rather ordinary looking 2-2-2s by the time they went out of service, they are perhaps more interesting and influential than sometimes given credit to. I don't think I really said enough about them in the printed version of the book. I shall try and produce a series of sketches, although material can be rather sparse. No. 9 started life in 1881 as a rather absurd express 4-2-4 tank engine with 7ft 8in driving wheels and was so prone to derailment it pr
JimC

JimC in GWR Locomotive Sketches

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GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR No 15.

GWR No 15 was a bar framed 0-4-0 by Bury. Note the domed firebox which it retained for its whole life in spite of other changes. Built in 1847 for the Shrewsbury and Chester Railway, it was withdrawn in 1903. This first sketch shows her around 1866.   And this second one about 1887, when it had been cut down in height.
JimC

JimC in GWR Locomotive Sketches

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Barry Railway Locomotive Sketches

Barry Railway K Class

This first sketch is aimed at being post war, but pre grouping.   In 1899, the Barry railway desperately needed some new locomotives, but all British builders were at full capacity. To resolve this, the five locomotives of the K class was ordered from Cooke Loco and Machine Co in the USA. It seems the Barry railway really wanted something as close as possible to the B1 class and the Americans wanted to build something as close as possible to their standard product. The result was a dec
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR 1813 Class

The 1813 Class is intriguing. They started off as side tanks, and ended up as pannier tanks with saddle tanks fitted in between. The side tanks didn't last very long, and this was a period where there were any number of experiments with boilers. Consequently there is extraordinary variety, and it seems as if not only were there no two the same, but none of them stayed the same for very long either. These sketches are the fruits of a small joint research exercise with @Mikkel. Beware of thinkin
JimC

JimC in GWR Locomotive Sketches

6
Barry Railway Locomotive Sketches

Barry Railway F Class

The F class was very similar to the A class except for the saddle tank. The F class is one of the trickier ones to sketch out, because there were several different batches from builders, and variations between the batches, front overhang for example, definitely existed. There are two styles of foot plate valance too.  The first five at least had a straight valance, the remainder curved as drawn.      This second sketch shows a lightly swindonised version of the F class, still
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR 322 Class Tank Engines

I'm not sure how I came to omit a sketch of this class from my book, but I certainly did. I included the tender version. Perhaps I was unsure how many drawings of similar looking pre-group pannier tanks should be included.    They have one of the more complex histories. The 322 class tale started in 1864. They were thirty 0-6-0 tender engines,  entirely of Beyer Peacock design, twenty ordered under the Gooch regime (322-341) and the rest (350-359) by Joseph Armstrong. They had plate (n
JimC

JimC in GWR Locomotive Sketches

5
Rhymney Railway Locomotive Sketches

Rhymney Railway M Class

The last of the outside framed classes had been delivered to the Rhymney in 1900, and from then on the locomotives took on a much more modern appearance. The first were what was later to be called the M class, and the  detailed design is usually credited to Robert Stephenson & Co. All subsequent locomotives for the Rhymney, other than a pair of locomotives which started life as railmotor units, bore a distinct family resemblance. These locomotives form a complicated and rather incestuous gro
Miscellaneous Musings

2-4-0s, and the Armstrong era in particular

When I wrote the first book I was rather guilty of somewhat glossing over the 2-4-0s in the Armstrong and Dean eras. There were so many of them, they were rebuilt so much and I just found them confusing and, dare I say it, not that interesting. I'm paying for it now! Working up my experimental chronologically based GWR locomotive history I'm in into the late 1860s, early 1870s, and they are becoming impossible to avoid! I have to wonder, incidentally, why, with standard goods engines and standar
JimC

JimC in Miscellaneous Musings

37
Rhymney Railway Locomotive Sketches

Rhymney Railway R Class (AR)

The last new locomotives for the Rhymney were ordered in February 1920, about the time when serious planning for the grouping started in the Cabinet (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7735748). Four were delivered by Hudswell Clarke in July and September 1921, and six from Beyer Peacock in December. They were slightly different in detail from the pre war R class. The classification AR doesn't seem to have ever been used in practice or officially but was certainly present on a
Barry Railway Locomotive Sketches

Barry Railway L Class

These ten locos, built in 1914, discarded the old Barry standards and were a bigger loco overall with a much bigger boiler and a very large bunker. They were generally considered successful with the exception of a serious and strange flaw. When running forwards the rear coupled wheels had a tendency to switch points as they passed through them, sending the trailing bogie down the other branch. In reverse, they were fine. Naturally this resulted in an immediate derailment, and this was usually co
GWR Locomotive Sketches

GWR 248 and 253 Class 0-6-0s

Bit of a veteran this time. These are  technically absorbed locomotives. 248 (upper sketch) is one of a class of five delivered to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway in 1854/5. They were an E.B. Wilson standard design. 253 (lower sketch) is one of seven more, with differences to the frames, were bought by the the Newport, Abergavenny and Hereford Railway. These lines merged into the West Midland Railway, which in turn was taken over by the GWR to form a significant part of the narro
JimC

JimC in GWR Locomotive Sketches

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Miscellaneous Musings

Book Format for Locomotive Development

I'm mulling over something different in the way of formats. Traditionally locomotive books have been written class by class, which in many ways is the most logical way to do it. But the trouble is that its difficult to get a sense of how design developed. Say for instance, you're looking at GWR 0-6-0 freight engines. You list the 57 class and its history from a cabless domeless sandwich frame locomotive in 1855 with Gooch motion, then maybe the renewals around the mid 1870s which were almost new
JimC

JimC in Miscellaneous Musings

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