JimC
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Posts posted by JimC
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10 hours ago, The Johnster said:
not that that prevented Swindon from building Castles up to 1950 and campaigning for
Or, for that matter, Marylebone's 3 cylinder white elephant. Seems to me there probably wasn't that big a gulf in costs between 3 cylinders and 3 valve gears and 4 cylinders and 2. But I m sure you're right, there wasn't a job for a Mattingly Pacific. To my mind the Hawksworth/Stanier 4 cylinder compound is a more interesting never was.
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10 hours ago, Prometheus said:
Thanks for the comments all. This is illustration I used principally. I cannot advise on its origin though.
The top one is the GWR sketch as included in RCTS. The centre one is a composite of issued weight diagrams over the sketch. I reckon there are substantial chunks of County and King in it, not sure about anything else. I think it must have been produced by an enthusiast, not a Swindon trained draughtsman. The third appears to be a composite based on photos of models. I'm not sure what all the components are, but I'm guessing Stanier Pacific and King are in there, probably County too.
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The consensus on the 4-6-2 seems to be that it was a project kicked off by the drawing office that Hawksworth had halted when he heard about it, so to call it a Hawksworth pacific is definitely stretching a point. Mattingly pacific perhaps . There isn't very much to go on because it didn't get very far. The basic weight diagram in RCTS part 9 is about all that's available I believe. That drawing shows a dome and apparently pop safety valves on the firebox, and no safety valve cover at all. It was cancelled at an early enough stage that really one is free to imagine what one likes, because who knows what would have changed as the design was worked up.
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I should have thought the water feed information was best obtained from those maintaining the locomotives now! Its something that could have been changed later as a result of experience though. I've got scans of the tender drawings register and I will say that I can't see any relevant drawings listed for A120 (which was ordered against lot 267) that are unique to that lot. A113, according to the Register, was originally ordered for Lot 234 (Castles) so the register might not list changes made post order. However the register does seem to support your contention that there was no difference. On the other hand Swindon seems to have been quite happy to swap autogear on and off pre group tank engines on works visits, so it doesn't seem impossible they could have changed pipework. I believe there were other changes that needed to be made to tenders to suit what they were leaving the works with. But tender frames seems to be something few notice. I wonder if I'm the only one who wishes Didcot would shuffles tanks between 3822 and 2999s tenders so 2999 could have the pre grouping style frames!
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On 11/12/2023 at 08:10, Wenrash said:
,,,the underframe they have provided has the 45 degree sloped frame, not the 12 degree frame of which the A113's had.
So the complete tender is something that never happened.
Well, it's something that so far as we know was never built new. As for never happened, don't we need to be rather careful about that? There's plenty of evidence for bitsas from Swindon, especially older tenders upgraded with the later 45 degree frames. According to the VCT list there are three surviving tenders from Lot A113, all of which now have the later style frames. I don't, I'm afraid, know what fillers they have. Tenders get horribly complicated. There are a number of weight diagrams from Swindon, for instance, that show combinations of tender features that were never on newly built tenders, but I would hesitate to say they never could have existed.
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I think the main takeaway is that one shouldn't generalise about locomotives with the ROD. We've got black ROD 2-8-0s, Khaki GW 53s, grey LBSCR E3s, and a suggestion on an SREMG page that the SECR P class were also grey. I've also just found a page stating that NNER T1s were painted grey.
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According to the GW liveries bible, Great Western Way, the GWR painted locomotives a shade of khaki between 1916 and 1917. 5322 was built new during this period and sent straight to France. So with 5322 what we are looking at would seem to be a representation of GWR Khaki rather than ROD livery. GWW also states some Dean Goods went overseas in GWR Khaki.
I rather doubt that under wartime conditions a gloss surface would be much of a problem. I'd anticipate a layer of matt grime at a very early stage.-
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I've seen ropes and/or horses mentioned to handle points on atmospheric lines. I should have thought the inconvenience and delays would have been rather significant.
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I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere that this is the result of altering a single track broad gauge tunnel ino double track standard. ISTR in other cases along there the tunnel was removed completely, but could be wrong.
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47 minutes ago, Miss Prism said:
I doubt it had another tender in the remainder of its service life.
Only takes one major water leak or some other catastrophic failure I suppose.
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12 hours ago, Penrhos1920 said:
How wide were 5 digit numberplates? Eg the shunter 15105
Good question! I've never seen a answer. Anyone?
If someone knows of a really square on photo as per Railwayana sales websites and can point me at it I could try measuring it up.
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5 hours ago, The Great Bear said:
What's the significance of the two sets of width measurements, Jim,
Cast iron and brass plates (see above in thread for details).
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Very hard to disprove...
Wouldn't it be better to turn the question round and ask whether any one has any evidence of a 4,000 gallon tender fitted to a Saint?-
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On 26/01/2024 at 21:48, Compound2632 said:
I suppose it was necessary to have at minimum one director from each constituent company.
According to Pole's book the GWR kept its existing 19 directors and added one from each of the constituents. I would say his text implies this was convenient rather than essential though.
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I don't see anything I'm afraid, having resolved my confusion with your other picture.
According to the VCT list that's a 1931/2 tender so could have carried "Great Western" when it was brand new, but since then there should have been GWR roundel, GWR and/or G crest W and various BR liveries including Departmental ones, and I don't see any sign of those either.-
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On 28/01/2024 at 21:28, neal said:
At the NLR Lamport, Northants, this large Collett tender sits alongside a Hall chassis, I am sure I can see Great Western through the rust. What do you think, look closely…
I think its British Railways (written in full) rather than Great Western. That's the 1931 - 1946 production tender chassis, and most of those would not have ever carried the words Great Western.
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2 hours ago, DCB said:
But then again why different boilers for Jubilee, Black 5 and 8F and then keep tinkering with throatplates etc. Maybe the LMS should have just got North British Loco co to design their locos.
I suppose if you are building enough of them there's much less disadvantage to having different boilers for different classes. More than a couple of hundred or so and you've probably got a big enough pool of spare boilers that there's little difference provided you have enough storage space for overhauled pool boilers. But my reading of Cox is that the attitude in the drawing offices was to find reasons not to use standard boilers rather than ways to use them. But as for throatplates and things, as long as a standard boiler fits the locomotive it doesn't need to be identical. There were a good number of variations on all the Swindon standard boilers with improvements over the years and even upgrades as they went through the shops. You get oddities like locomotives that have top feed for a few years and then lose it again with a change to a non top feed boiler.
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17 hours ago, melmerby said:
What's known generally as London consists of two cities... and a large number of Boroughs...
In common parlance this whole is referred to as the "City of London".
Perhaps city of London would be better. Small c.
The whole is perhaps worthy of one of those Venn type diagrams that are produced to explain to our transatlantic cousins how Great Britain, United Kingdom, British Isles etc overlap.
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I wonder what the logic was with the 1922 amalgamations. It's hard to believe there were any operational or practical advantages in an amalgamation that only lasted a year, so I suppose it must have been to do with manipulating share holdings/share classes or executive/director posts. Do any of you know?
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17 minutes ago, rodent279 said:
Probably not, and probably yes, but there was a huge surplus of Army lorries post WW1, and a large number of Army personnel who had learnt to drive, so the driver was there, if you'll excuse the pun.
Which in turn was presumably the driver for updating a road system fit only for horse drawn vehicles...
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3 hours ago, rodent279 said:
So, if the Grouping in 1921 was a means of ensuring smaller less financially sound railways did not go bust, was the Grouping a missed opportunity? Did the railways really need a kind of Beeching MK1 in 1921?
But was there enough of a road system in 1921 to make a Beeching Mk1 possible? Could it be argued that Beeching was facilitated by 1930s/1950s road building?
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46 minutes ago, TheSignalEngineer said:
Top men in loco departments a very small pool.
I haven't thought through it, but were Churchward and Collett somewhat outside that pool? If the Swindon men were a little distanced from such a fraternity would that be part of Swindon's "splendid isolation"? As I say I haven't examined it to see if its true, and I might be completely wrong, and of course cause and effect. Just offering it up as a discussion point.
Going back to the early 19thC I did some potted biographies of early engineers for a project I'm working on, and it was evident that Gooch and the Armstrongs of the GWR came from a very small pool of Northumbrians including Stephensons, Hackworths and the like whose families were all known to each other. -
Actually I kinda wonder if in some respects Collett might have been better on the LMS? He was very much a details man, and might have succeeded better in getting the LMS drawing offices to abandon some of their more dubious detail design.
I think there's an argument that, in his desire not to be seen as just importing GWR, Stanier was sometimes a little too tolerant of mediocre designs/existing practice from his drawing offices.
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3 hours ago, Dunsignalling said:
As for the BR3 prairies; they didn't have the all-round capability of a 5101 and having both on the strength of a depot invited unfavourable comparisons.
And fundamentally two locos of much the same weight with much the same boiler wasn't that unfair a comparison. The Churchward standards seemed to get away with much larger cylinders (or if you like smaller boilers) than you'd expect. Although the 43s could get caught out by fast and heavy freight trains (which is where we started) .
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The one they never built.
in GWR Rolling Stock: model and prototype
Posted · Edited by JimC
More info...
If one is doing alternate histories one may imagine Collett's wife not dying young, Collett retiring in 1936 at her instigation, and Hawksworth picking up his compound Castle proposal with a large chunk of the Chapelon ideas that were demonstrably (Grange valve chests) already floating round Swindon. The result could potentially have been spectacular given a high superheat boiler, maybe even enlarged to Std 7 size.
[later] And to my surprise I think the boiler on the surviving GWR diagram of the "Compound Castle" *is* a standard 7. It's not very safe scaling from such drawings, especially from scans, not originals, but I'm about 85% confident that's the case. The proposal had 2* 17 x26 cylinders and 2* 25x26. It doesn't seem to me that would have been lighter than the Castle's 4* 16x26, but I don't know enough to offer any kind of informed opinion.