lanchester

Just caught up with this thread and the discussion a few pages back about setts, cobbles etc. A couple of observations. Firstly, the line of the kerb may often delineate land ownership, rather than necessarily a sensible layout of roads, pavements etc. Second, you quite often see, 'inside' such a kerb, that the 'paving' is cobbles rather than setts - I assume to discourage traffic from straying onto your property, and indeed from peering through your windows or bashing into your house/factory/warehouse walls. Third, quite often, at least round here (East Cheshire) the main thoroughfares/heavy traffic routes are paved with granite setts - better able to resist iron-shod wheels/horse hooves, whereas pedestrian paving and minor lanes use setts of the local, significantly softer, sandstone. On steep slopes the latter is often laid with the laminae/bedding planes vertical, which gives an interesting texture and more grip, (no idea how you would model it) although I imagine it is less hard-wearing. There is also the question of economics. I imagine granite setts are by some way the most expensive option (even in a granite area - they are a lot harder to work). Suitable local sandstone may be cheaper if available (for example, round here the Kerridge sandstones made good flags for roofing, but some beds that didn't readily cleave as thinly might be used for setts). Cobbles would be cheap if you are beside a suitable beach, but they don't have to be beach/river derived. Round here suitable cobble-sized stones occur in glacial boulder-clay deposits and have been used as in my second point above. Finally, there is always the wooden block option.

Of course, if you do a map of the UK with true North actually at the top, instead of slanting our islands so we can fit Shetland in, it turns out that the fabled North South divide is more accurately close to an East West divide. (You can't get more southern that Cornwall but it has many of the same problems as the North). I blame Geology. And the first phase Roman occupiers ran their boundary more or less along the A46 for a reason - why spend your time yomping over Dartmoor or the Pennines being abused by the natives when you can set up a nice tight little villa in the Cotswolds and swap chariot anecdotes with Hieronymus Scribafilius.

The Cavendish Dukes of Devonshires are indeed often suspected of pinko-liberal tendencies, but just for the record Haddon Hall is actually a property of the Manners Dukes of Rutland (the Belvoir Castle mob) along with quite a lot of the Bakewell area. Unlike the Devonshires they don't seem to have done politics much, but one Marquis of Granby (the courtesy title of the eldest son) was Colonel, the Horse Guards, from 1766 and was used to set up outstanding soldiers that were no longer of use to the Regiment with their own pub, provided only that they called it 'The Marquis of Granby'. That makes him a GOOD CHAP, even, surely, in the eyes of the anarchist-communist comrades.

Since we have been touching on the significance of 'historical accuracy' and 'historical method' for our hobby, may I just chip in with a few observations (some of which are definitely in the 'bleeding obvious' category)? Firstly, 'railway enthusiasm' takes many forms, some but not all of which overlap. My uncle approached the railway with a stopwatch (and his background included national service at Longmoor so obvs he was into operations). My father took an engineering view - he was a 'child' of the Lambton Engine Works, and later his firm represented North British Loco (which is why I seem to be a trifle short of inherited wealth!). For me, the decline in both eyesight and clean locomotives combined to make 'trainspotting' a pointless exercise - so my interest has been in routes and their history, and along the way the unique insights that the railway can give to every other interest from geology and wildlife to industrial archaeology, social history, and influence on current society - you can't, for example, have a serious discussion about the 'Windrush generation' of West Indian migrants without understanding at least something of how the railways worked, the challenges they faced, and why as a career railway work had gone from a respected, high status (not the same as high paid), job with a defined career path, (and one where you get to wear a uniform without carrying a gun) to a low status, dirty, declining prospects, old fashioned dead end - so we needed to recruit from the Caribbean. But as others have already commented, 'the sources' as in any other branch of history need to be treated with caution. Of course we have the 'problem' of old men consciously or unconsciously 'massaging' their anecdotes - like any oral history you adapt the delivery to the audience, their needs and expectations: that is true of the tradition that led to Homer, or the Icelandic sagas: it applies equally to folks like Norman McKillop (recalling events on the North British forty years before he was writing). You polish the delivery, you elide several incidents into one (for dramatic effect, as the film industry would say). Distressing though it may be, Nock, Tuplin, even Rogers, Cox et al, had books to sell. (And Nock had been dependent for his earnings on a company which in turn needed the good opinion/orders of railway engineers. It is not outrageous to suggest that this may have coloured his perceptions a bit; also, his first book was 'Locomotives of Sir Nigel Gresley' (1945) which was a considerable success - unlikely he would naturally big up Gresley's heretical successor). And all that assumes the author/recounter is trying to be fair/honest - which ain't necessarily so. It does, for example, seem clear that there were quite a few people who had a 'down' on Edward Thompson, for a variety of different, valid or invalid, reasons, and that includes people who probably never met him. 'He vandalised 'Great Northern' therefore he and all his works are a Bad Thing'. But hey - Thompson was Vincent Raven's son-in-law, and since in my little universe Raven is up there with Eric Clapton as some sort of demi-god, obviously I have a bias in the other direction. The points about the probity or otherwise of 'primary evidence' - contemporaneous documents, official reports and minutes, and the like - are well made. We know even in current affairs that an 'official, independent' report or investigation may be the truth, but is highly unlikely to be the whole truth. There are ways of writing things, not just findings but actual decisions, that can skew the reality. I spent much of my early career in part as a minute-taker, in organisations ranging from my students' union to various professional engineering associations. I didn't often have to agree with the Chairman beforehand what the minutes would say, but certainly one knew the expectations. The really interesting bit, I think, is not the possibly erroneous nature of reminiscences, nor the carefully crafted contemporary 'official ' version, but the mismatch between the 'objective' truth and what people really believed at the time or very shortly after: the rumour mill way before the Internet, for example. (Tonypandy, anyone?). It may well be, for example, that many railwaymen believed a certain class of locomotive was useless, because that was what the scuttlebutt said, and nobody is really that bothered to correct it. Doesn't mean it was true, but it does mean that the belief may have affected what people did at the time (there are ways of 'failing a loco' because you don't have confidence in it/have heard bad things, without it necessarily being a wrong'un - but of course that 'failure' will stack up in the statistics). Similarly, did say Thompson really have particularly poor man management skills (which for the day and in wartime would have to have been fairly extreme to be noticed - sort of thing that ends you up in court these days for bullying/harrassment), or was he the man in position at a rotten time for everyone, and remembered unfavourably against the rather happier circumstances that Peppercorn inherited, or the Golden Age of Gresley? My point is, even if we do know from contemporaneous sources what people believed at the time, it still ain't necessarily so. Mind you, how much of this affects your choice of Gibson versus Markit, I'm not too sure - but as this thread and indeed this forum does prove every day, 'the railway' is a multi-faceted enthusiasm and can lead us all into whole other areas of life. Which is good.

Thing I've wondered about for a long time - why was a 2-4-4 wheel arrangement almost unknown (tank or tender) in the UK. (I understand the arrangement was called the 'Boston' and there were a few in the US; also in parts of Europe, but never many, and none that I can find in Britain. I'm not counting 2-4-4 Mallet, or Forney 'logging' types, although I think Bachmann did one of the latter). On the face of it, you might think think a leading pony truck to give some 'steer' but, especially if you are taper boilered and perhaps unsuperheated, not carrying too much weight. Two driving axles carrying most of the fixed adhesive weight; and a rear bogie carrying, and clearing, any weight of firebox plus, if you are in tank mode, a generous coal/water bunker (and if you get the springing right, perhaps a better ride for the crew). But I am not aware of any locomotives, at least working in Britain, (we might have built some for abroad?) of that arrangement. 2-4-2T were common on many lines - you could have added a rear bogie just for range (and probably still fit the available turntables). Whereas 2-6-2T or 2-6-4T tend to be quite significantly bigger locomotives, and 'Atlantic' tanks seem to me to be putting the extra carrying capacity at the wrong end.. Now, full disclosure, I failed my Mech Eng degree twice, (although that was final year at a Russell Group University so that is almost a qualification in the modern world).so I may well be missing something obvious. But I am curious why no-one here went down that road (and heaven knows, some of our finest locomotive engineers explored most other by-ways). And now the fun bit - what would a 2-4-4 or 2-4-4T by say Worsdell or Stroudley or Johnson or Dean (I'm not suggesting eg Churchward cos I imagine the extra weight of superheat into the 1900's might change the equation). I can't do the pix /graphics ec but anyone out there like to have a go? oR explain why this is a no-go?

Tony, I think you have picked a slightly iffy 'fact' to 'leave aside' here. I'm sure you are right that Chester's walls are more complete than York's, but I think they may also be more Roman? Although York's walls run mostly, but by no means always, on the lines of the Roman walls, hardly any of the visible fabric of York's walls is Roman - the multiangular tower, parts of Bootham Bar (below ground level), and that's about it. To the extent that the medieval is built on top of the Roman, the latter is embanked in ramparts and invisible. By contrast many visible sections of Chester's walls include in situ Roman masonry ten or more courses high. As a former journal editor and occasional reviewer, albeit in a quite different field, I myself have too often been guilty of introducing one error while trying to correct another, which of course is what gives pedantry a bad name!

Personally I would go for something long-boilered - The NER 1001 'class' and its many relatives. The glory is that they were built in several different works, (Leeds, Gateshead, York, a few outside contractors I think, plus the S&D built much the same sort of thing when it was a semi-independent operation, 1863-1873 or thereabouts). Fletcher really didn't do standardisation - not just of details like cabs but even of wheel diameters, and to call any of these a 'class' is really stretching things. So if you've run out of, say, Salter safety valves, that's OK. If your attempt at a cab looks like it was run up on someone's allotment, or you nicked one off a Worsdell body you had lying around, (hey, take the whole boiler, for a later period) well there's a prototype for that (especially since most of them were never photographed). Poor old McDonnell came in with ideas for standardisation, and was he thanked? No way! And if it doesn't look quite North Eastern, you could claim it is one of the Earl of Durham's home-grown jobbies ex Lambton Engine Works exploiting running rights. Some of them look exactly like they were assembled from a spare parts box (they were before my great grandfather's time, 1897 onwards, but I suspect that is exactly how they were put together. Lambton did have a proper boiler shop at one time, also foundry etc but why would you when you can buy in boilers, wheelsets etc from the North East's many local contractors, or second hand from the 'big railway'). Can't go wrong.

If I can ask without sounding like a complete nerd, are you sure you are right to have adverts for Lyons and Brooke Bond teas in a Co-op window, given the latter was (still is?) a major blender of its own teas?

Didn't Dickens have Sam Weller say something similar about poverty and oysters?

I know this has been touched on in various threads, but I am curious about traffic in fodder for the hundreds of thousands of horses employed in the pre-motor age. Villages and small towns, OK I imagine mostly animal feed was sourced locally and didn't involve the railways. But for major conurbations (London, obviously, but Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester etc) that doesn't work - the nearest fields are miles out, and anyway would have more value raising crops or milk or veg for human consumption in the cities (and we know quite a lot about traffics including milk, fruit and veg, etc over the railways).. The rail companies themselves had stable-loads of horses involved in distribution (and some, I know, - Midland had a big depot near Melton Mowbray, I think, and I seem to remember the, Great Western had dedicated fodder wagons/vans for its own needs), but there are all the other 'private' horses involved in distribution from railheads, not to mention hackney carriages, private carriages, cavalry regiments etc. They've all got to be fed. But how? Hay, straw, whatever, low weight, high volume, must be brought in to the cities from many miles away: it is seasonal so you need warehousing. Yet it is hard to find either pictures of rail-based foddering (if that is a word) operations - or indeed of road operations: there are scenes of urban areas crammed with horse-drawn traffic, both passenger and freight, but you don't often see cartloads of hay or the equivalent in urban settings - being delivered for example to those 'mews' that the posh folks had behind thee West End mansions. Nor do you see on the maps and photographs any obvious facilities at stations. So how did the average urban carthorse or Hackney get its feed? Or the stables in areas such as Newmarket? Was hay/straw baled or loose (which might affect the type of wagon employed). And if it wasn't by rail, then...? I know the Lambton Hetton and Joicey had vans for 'choppy', the local term for feed for pit ponies, but that was only moving a few miles in a mostly rural area on a private railway. How did all those other nags get their oats? If we knew, strikes me it could be an as yet underexploited traffic to model, for example from your otherwise traffic-light BLT?

Not son of, but the same family. Ralph B had his seat in Bunbury, Cheshire and his father was something to do with Mersey Docks & Harbour amongst other things. Sir Aubrey of l'al Ratty connection (the house was Irton Hall, incidentally, which is now a hotel/conference centre), was a Director of the GWR (as well as of Cunard who had a controlling interest in, and eventually bought out, the family shipping company). J & T Brocklebank was originally a Whitehaven company going back to the 1790s, both building and operating ships, but moved to the Mersey in the 19th century. Cunard kept the Brocklebank name going for cargo operations until, I think, the 1980s. Sir A was a financial backer of the R&ER in the Twenties (died 1929) because he owned the quarries and the crushing plant at Murthwaite that R&ER served with their standard gauge arrangement (sold to Keswick Granite in the 1950s when his last surviving partners clocked out).. I suppose it might be quite helpful for Brocklebanks to have one Director in the LNWR looking after the Liverpool interests, and another influencing the Great Western across the river in Birkenhead. Covering all the bases and ensuring favourable rates for the Boat Trains? Alternatively these, as I suppose cousins of some sort, may have hated each other's guts, and backed rival rail companies just out of spite? Who knows?

I've probably got this all wrong, but I had the idea that (some?) truss rod underframes had some sort of turnbuckle arrangement so they could be adjusted for the body load (obviously, not for varying loads in traffic, just to be about right for the superstructure) and that this was the whole point of a truss rod (as opposed to a truss made up from angle irons). Of course there is also the well-known case of the prototype glass-fibre bodied carriage (S1000, which I think still exists on the East Somerset Railway?) which flexed to the point that the doors jammed when loaded, despite being perfectly sound in terms of structural strength. I don't know whether such considerations affected wooden-bodied vehicles when they became longer - I can imagine they might to have needed more solid members to avoid undue flexure than were strictly necessary for strength? That would take up usable body width - only a few inches each side, but it matters. (Which would in turn favour steel-skinned vehicles which can take some of the shear loads - a similar evolution to that occurring in aviation, where the metal skin of a Spitfire, for example, is taking load that the fabric skin of a Hurricane can't, (which if I'm right is why the Spit was capable of continuous improvement/ size increase etc. whereas the Hurricane was competitive with the Spit Mk 1 or 2, but couldn't really develop beyond). And of course, over different timescales but for similar reasons, trains planes and automobiles all tended towards monocoque construction. Health warning _ all this could be rubbish - I failed final year Mech Eng at Sheffield not once but twice - so what do I know! (On the other hand, part of the reason for that was that I was Secretary of my Student Union, and my success rate in getting late licences from the magistrates is still revered. I suppose, if I was put on this Earth for a reason, that was probably it!).

In fairness, Brightside is mostly on the higher ground and indeed, before the total spread of the city, was a 'resort' for people looking for some fresh and unpolluted air. That may have been true even when the railways first arrived (1840's?) although of course they were a contributor to, how can I put this nicely, a certain degradation in the quality of the lived environment.

I had always been under the impression that the Styal line electrification had been at 6.25kV initially, but confess I can't find any evidence for that. An urban myth? But there may have been a lot of 'urban myth' even in the day, 28 July 1968, Dad and I were on a railtour, promoted by the Severn Valley and Manchester Rail Travel Societies ,originating and terminating BNS, around Lancashire, the last steam-hauled segment of which was with 48773 from Rose Grove: and all the 'pre flight info' said that would come off at Man Vic (from memory I think the wires issue may even have been mentioned in the literature - my timing sheet is currently in storage with the rest of my previous life, so I can't check). Nonetheless, 48773 went on via Droylsden to finish under the wires at Stockport (where we were picked up by the same Brush 4, (D1945 from memory although I may be wrong on the last digit) as had brought us up that morning. Point is, Everyone (not just spotty eleven year olds like me) on the train was amazed - this isn't allowed, look at the yellow stripe. So the belief that yellow stripe was a total ban under the 25kV wires was, I think, universal - regardless of what the actual rules may have been. Note this info does not totally correspond with what is on Six Bells Junction (including the ID of the Brush 4). When I finally get my stuff out of storage, if its still there - not checked for about four years but I'm still paying the fees, and now that the Mother in Law has 'passed' (side query- why does everyone now 'pass': why don't they just die, like people used to?) and we can get our own stuff into the house I will find the timing sheet, confirm and email the Six Bells chappy accordingly. But 48773 under the wires at Stockport is definitely true..

I wondered whether perhaps the confusion was with the V1 (doodlebug). There was a raid on Manchester, Christmas Eve 1944, with forty odd V1s air launched from He 111s over the North Sea, and one actually came down in Chester, although as far as I can tell, none hit Liverpool.

I believe Beaumaris is low slung because it was never finished - Edward decided the Welsh were pacified enough and went off to blatt the Scots. He wasn't altogether a nice person, old Longshanks.

The thing I don't quite get, though, is that it was really the Midland that started the trend towards heavier (passenger) trains, with their introduction of sleepers, diners, Pullmans - heavier vehicles and more of them - so you would expect them to have been going towards larger locomotives, and indeed as has been noted above the Compounds were large for their time: but then it all stopped. Other, reasonably comparable, lines didn't - the GER didn't stop at 'Clauds' (and they certainly had infrastructure constraints such as turntable lengths) and built 4-6-0s, the Great Central went beyond 'Directors', and the NER beyond the M and R class, to Atlantics (successfully) and 4-6-0s (less successfully). Even most of the Scottish railways tried to bulk up, and while the Highland's attempts were kyboshed by their CCE, at least they tried. Some at least of those must have had passenger businesses with similarities to the Midland? Freight/minerals business models of course are entirely different things, even on the same railway. One takes the point about coal trains (limits on lay-by lengths, too many dodgy PO wagons, not time sensitive, etc) but I would have thought the Midland would have had an interest in faster, if not necessarily heavier, trains for traffics such as Fish, Beer, parcels, newspapers - these were highly competed for on time as well as rates, not to mention the operational advantages of getting these a bit closer to passenger timings. I would have thought the Midland's Commercial people, not to mention the customer-shareholders in places like Burton, would have been kicking up? But where is the equivalent of the GNR's K1/K2; the S1/2/3 on the NER, the GCR's Imminghams, Urie's S15s etc? Saying that a 'smaller engine' policy suited their business model only raises questions about why they had a business model seemingly unlike any of their competitors.

I suspect (and think I've seen this somewhere, though heaven knows where) that Directors and active shareholders of many of the pre-grouping companies were quite relaxed, or even quietly enthusiastic, about the possibilities of nationalisation circa 1921. It makes sense. War damage to make good, at a time when the economy was veering from boom to bust and so new capital difficult to raise; serious industrial unrest (on the railways and the industries they served). Suburban traffic had been under intense pressure from trams since well pre-war, and buses were becoming a thing (the NER, for example, went into replacement bus services on quite a large scale - Ken Hoole did a book). Ex-servicemen were buying up ex-army lorries and cherry-picking suitable freight. Some visionaries were seeing air as competition on long-distance passenger, and mail, routes. Coal, the mainstay of many lines, was under increasing pressure from oil in, for example, shipping - the 'Jellicoe specials' of WW1 were already an anachronism, most major capital warships, and many smaller vessels, being oil-fuelled. All this would be obvious to the more thoughtful investor. At best, railway shares would become like a current utility (low but secure and steady returns) but that would only happen if there was government regulation of rail and of its competitors such as applies to modern day utilities, (and even then, as we have seen recently with energy companies, things can still go horribly wrong). I don't know to what extent 'widows and orphans' were invested in railways but I suspect that, in late C19 and after the various bubbles, railways were seen as a fairly safe investment. That was about to change. Government had powers anyway, dating back to mid-Victorian times (Gladstone before he was PM?) to nationalise individual companies under some circumstances. All told, I suspect that if the government of the day had pushed for nationalisation, offering shareholders a reasonable buy-out, they would have met with a lot less resistance than they might have expected. But what did the 'Daily Mail' of the time (which would be, er, the 'Daily Mail') say?

Sort of related - or not? The LNER had an ex-North Eastern B13 as a 'counter-pressure locomotive' for use along with the dynamometer car. What did this do? How did it work? Why would you need a dedicated locomotive (was it modified or instrumented in some way?) and did the other railways with dynamometer cars have similar?

Couple of quick queries - if coach was 'economy class' a) am I right in thinking that in 'stagecoach' days the coach was the outside/on the top seating? and b) what did Americans call vehicles that were superior to coach cars? (I imagine being ever so egalitarian they wouldn't have gone much for First, Second etc). Elsewhere, there is discussion of the differing applications of bogies and trucks. But a tram was a four wheeled colliery truck or tub over here as well as what the Americans call a street car, but their street cars are also called trolleys, but we had trolley buses even though they didn't run on trolleys, trucks, bogies or trams! Oh, and 'tram' is from an Old German name for a beam or shaft, and I think originally may have implied something more like a sledge (ie wheel-less). I don't think 'A Tram/Bogie/Trolley/Tub called Desire' would have worked quite so well for Tennessee Williams, though. Although 'That's why the Lady is a Tram' works quite well? And when you see old accounts along the lines of 'the train was of eight bogies', is that four vehicles running on eight trucks, or is it eight bogied vehicles?

And a lot. On the ex-GWR, the 1600, 1500 and 9400 classes (some of the latter lasting barely five years, I believe). OK, they may not have been purely shunting locomotives (light branch line work, empty stock movements, etc). And then there was the outrageous new build of J72 (NER class E1) - what was that about, especially since the LNER had been acquiring ex-MOS Austerities (J94)? I don't remember J72s doing much trip work - most of those I knew were station pilots and the like, and very pretty they looked too, in NER light green, east end of Newcastle Central, (68723, 68736?) and viewed through the big front windows of a dmu going to my gran in Hexham past Geordie Stephenson's birthplace and over the bowstring bridge at Wylam. Sometimes invited into the dmu cab to 'drive' (well, put my hand on the throttle at least). So many unrepeatable experiences in one short trip. PS Thinking about it, J72s may have been tripping in Hull, I suppose, but then as now that was a foreign country and they did things differently there.

Worse things happen at Hannover Fair. My advertising manager was driving, gave me a map and told me to navigate. I had to admit we were completely lost: I couldn't find a place called Ausfahrt anywhere on the map! (Admittedly it was 2 in the morning and drink may have been taken - by me, not the driver)

That's sort of the inverse of the well-known 'Van Halen rider', whereby the band specified M&M's in the dressing room with a particular colour removed. The justification was that the band had a particularly complex technical set-up, and if the promoter hadn't read the contract/ couldn't be bothered about the M&Ms, they probably weren't observing the more important/expensive/potentially life threatening requirements either.

The 'Wiltshire Cure' was, and still is, a highly regarded treatment (unlike the 'York Cure', which was at least equally regarded but now, as I understand, is extinct). So the pig trade into (and products out of?) places like Cirencester or Calne may have been of pretty high value/priority?

Totally off-topic, but why are the wheels on that 0-8-0 so small? Or alternatively, why are the splashers so big - it hardly looks as though it needs splashers at all. As regards the lack of plates on ex-LNWR engines, could it be that, because the smokebox door didn't have to support a dart or wheel mechanism, it was of significantly lighter construction?