JimC

Think you'll find most coal merchants started business from railway goods yards. Given half a chance merchants would hang on to a wagon and fill sacks direct from the wagon. Of course the railway didn't like that at all.

I've tidied up my sketch a bit and given it outside bearing for the trailing bogie, and the Bear's original 8 wheel tender. There seems to be an awful lot of daylight under the tender, which makes me wonder if I've misinterpreted the limited drawings I have. The six wheel tender version would have just about squeezed onto a 65ft turntable, albeit probably too out of balance to turn readily. This one on the other hand is just a fatal bit too long, although in practice a removable extension piece as was done with some 55ft turntables would be a viable option for both. The Bear's tender is more interesting than I suspected when I came to draw it. It doesn't seem to have the well between the frames of the other standard tender so has higher sides. The tender in the other drawing is a well tank 3,500 gallon tender, but it's one of the ones that was given essentially cosmetic higher sides than it really needs.

The firebox is six feet wide, so it must clear the whole wheel, not just the axle.

I put this together after a thread on another forum. I've always considered that the chief issue with the Great Bear was excessively long fire tubes, but it was pointed out that there was at least one successful locomotive class with 23ft tubes - the German DRG05 4-6-4 that held the steam speed record with 200km/h on essentially level track. I took a look at the numbers, and basically if the Bear's firebox and grate were increased in size by about 25% the resulting proportions aren't so different from the DRG05. So here you are.

They're a minefield. Not least the Swindon versus Wolverhampton thing, where a Wolverhampton built locomotive might go into Swindon works with a Wolverhampton profile one and come out with a Swindon style one.

Yes, agree surely an 850/1901. Not sure when jacks stopped being carried on the footplate, that might date it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the photo was late 19thC.

Its all very weird though. Freezer must surely have seen umpteen 94s. How did he get the idea they had screw reverse, and where did the other tales come from? Offhand I can't think of any GWR classes that converted from screw to lever reverse in the right sort of timespan that the tales could be confused with. 2251s went the other way I believe.

94xx reversing gear. I've been pointed at drawing 122690, which is for Lot 365 and is of reversing lever and quadrant. That's an October 1945 drawing for lot 365 , the Swindon build, so I'm pretty reasonably confident they were all lever reverse.

Yes (all of them on one or other!) There were all sorts of combinations of frame setups, some of them quite eccentric to my eyes. Quite a few of the 2-4-0s had inside frames for the driving wheels and outside frames for the leading wheels. Maybe it made for more room round the cylinders. Actually, you've got me wondering now, what were the cylinders fastened to on a locomotive with just outside frames?Must look that up. And you remind me of an excellent point. I need to make very sure I've distinguished (correctly) between outside frames and double frames (or even part and part!)

Here's another little in progress vignette. I thought I should make myself a list of 2-4-0 builds and renewals so I can get a bit of a track on what I should be documenting. This list doesn't include a myriad of boiler variations, it just new builds and renewals and rebuilds which had significant chassis changes! Its a working document for me, so excuse the formatting and the crude layout, also the screenshot because I couldn't be bothered to format text for the web forum, but I was so struck by the variety I thought I'd share it. My next job is to list which I have done sketches of, which I have enough info to make sketches, and which, for I fear there will be some, are going to stump me completely!

As an example of allocations the notorious Lot A112, the intermediates, is marked in the register as being for Lot 232 (castles 4083-4092), but the register actually states they went out with 4088, 4091, 4092, 4008, 4083, 4087, 4016, 4032, 4019, 4086. Build dates suggest only the first three were new tender and new locomotive. Note that this is the only entry in the drawing Register that lists which tender went with which locomotive, and I rather suspect it was added years after the event.

To put a bit more flesh on it, a Lot of GWR tender locomotives was normally, but not always, ordered with a Lot of tenders. The Granges seem to be one that wasn't - at least I can't see a tender Lot marked for locomotive Lot 308 in the tender drawings register I just checked. My understanding is that it was always planned to cascade them. According to RCTS A148 was turned out Jan-Sep 1939, while the Manors left the works Jan 1938-Feb 1939. At the time there was a presumably good 3,500 gallon tender from each withdrawn 43, plus a bunch of usually older tenders with withdrawn Dukes and Bulldogs etc. So I suppose you could say the extra 3,500 gallon tenders freed up from fitting A148 to Halls, Castles and Stars actually ended up on Dukedogs. It seems a good assumption though that the Works just kept building new tenders and they were fitted behind whatever was leaving the works that needed one.

Another difference was that the bearing for the coupling rod (but not the connecting rod) on the driving wheel was 1/4 in larger on the 45. All the others were the same though. Unfortunately the 1942 list of bush dimensions I have a copy of doesn't list dimensions for any of the pre Churchward 0-6-0T (or of course, the Hawksworth ones!). The dimensions for the 54/64/74 bushes, which I suppose might be similar to 2021s, are rather different from the 44s, suggesting that wheels wouldn't have been interchangeable between 44s and 850s->2021s without crankpin changes.

Maybe so , but it can be great fun. The massive beartrap waiting, though, is to be so pleased with one's highly logical and plausible theory that you attempt to hold onto it after contradictory evidence comes to light. Been there, done it, hopefully metaphorically slapped myself round face and instructed self not to be so daft.

The words "Thus the six-wheel engines for the seven-feet gauge, as those on the Great Western Railway, belong to class A" are interesting. I should have thought that choice of words at their least imply that there were other Class A engines. I'm away from my library, but what was the situation with other broad gauge lines that early? Were any operational? I just had a reasonable scan through RCTS broad gauge, and I don't know how thorough it is on locomotives that never made it to the GWR. Mind you a contractor's locomotive is also a very viable possibility I would have thought.

I note that many of the GWR 2-2-2s had the same size leading and trailing wheels. That causes me to idly wonder, not having much anything in the way of skills in this area, whether one could drive the carrying wheels and leave the driving wheels running free. Given double frames, perhaps the driving wheels could sit independently on short axles, leaving a gap between them for mechanism.

All perfectly true, but hopefully there is a saving on the design side because you can start with a known good design of chassis with, hopefully, the bugs ironed out and all the bought in components identified.

I suppose if no battle plan survives contact with the enemy then perhaps no arrangement plan survives the first general overhaul!

One could have a spot the difference here! Feel free folks, especially if you can spot something I'd otherwise miss when I come to my sketches. I was thinking that these two variants on the 79 class were so alike as not to be worth illustrating, but I've decided there's enough change there that it should be highlighted. These are the Ahrons drawings, from the Holcroft Armstrong's book, of the 2nd Goods (1857) and the 4th Goods (1861). The thing that particularly struck me was the apparent lack of a sand box on the 79. I suppose there could be a tiny sandbox between the frames, (I've found what appears to be one such in "The British Steam Locomotive" but its a bit odd. The actual pipes are clearly different, Ahrons is not tracing his own drawings. It could be an error I suppose, even Homer nods. I'm beginning to find this early stuff rather fascinating, but always the way I suppose. I fear I lack the skills and perhaps more importantly the determination to follow @MikeOxon into modelling the period though. I will admit to being happy to have little in the way of locomotive breaks (we are in the 19thC here, breaks is correct) as I find them a particular pain to get right.

Well, it would seem so. Its not impossible, I suppose, that some were screw fitted initially, maybe the first lot, but bearing in mind that screw reverse needs to interact with the firebox casing if not the tanks I can't imagine fitting it would be a shed job, even f the factory would supply the parts. I'll ask on GWSG. Someone there should know.

That seems to be the case, yes. Certainly neither 9400 or 9466 have it now.

Mistakes. We all make them, and if I was immune I wouldn't have to publish this errata sheet for my [hopefully first] book. https://www.devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/errata/GWRlocoDevelopmentErrataFirstEdition.pdf At the moment I've been going through some of my sketches for the book, improving some of the older ones where I think I can do better now, and adding some new ones where I can. I reuse everything I can, so coming to do a 79 class (1858 0-6-0) based on the Ahrons drawing in Holcroft's Armstrongs of the Great Western, I resolved to use as much as possible of my drawing of the slightly earlier and very similar 57 class. All well and good,and inside frames and motion went easily, whilst different size wheels are scarcely a problem, just count the spokes. So I got to the boiler. A quick cross check in RCTS confirmed that the principal dimensions are recorded as being the same, so I anticipated a straight copy and paste. Pasted it in and... Well, just didn't match. An overlay of three of the Ahrons drawings in Holcroft (see below) seems to suggest that his 57 boiler is just a little short. I've lined up 57, 79 and 121 drawings in the image below and you can see the variation. So what to do. The trouble is although we have boiler dimensions in RCTS, they are inside the cladding, so of limited use. So do I go with my source, or do I conjecturally amend? Rightly or wrongly I'm taking the view that as these are my sketches, not Ahrons, and as I claim to be doing more than simply copying his work, I'm going to change the boiler on the 57 to be what I think it probably was, rather than reflect the source. It was a nasty surprise though. As a little something to amuse further, here's two other things I picked up. This is a page extract from C J Freezer's "Locomotives in Outline, GWR". You can see that my copy has angry pencil annotations. I was very detuned when I put these in, because I'd put the statement about lever reverse in the book, and had to make a desperate last second change as it went to the printers, for the proof had already been approved. Fainter are the words "Too short" above the bunker. Freezer had unaccountably drawn the same rear overhang on his 94 drawing as on a 57, which is of course too short, and there are all sorts of distortions of bunker door cutout and roof to cram it all in. Compare the proportions on the real 94. (photo 9466 group on Facebook)

It's probably a good way to weed out less serious expressions of interest! Quite a few public libraries have printers the public can use so there's always a way.

Annotated drawings is a good thought. I did something like that for GWR valve gear because I had trouble working out what all the bits were, and especially as the GWR occasionally uses different terms to other lines. http://devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/GWStephensonGear.php I've also done a page of reversing lever arrangements http://devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/GWReversingArrangements.php I'll have a thought what else might be useful. Suggestions welcome. Just don't expect me to explain how an injector works!

Absolutely. The images have to be in strict date order, otherwise what's the point.