Imaginary Rolling Stock

[relaxinghobby]

 

 

A loco called Inveighable.

 

I'm not sure if this would work, a Bulleid pacific converted to a mallet or articulated steam bogie type? Perhaps something unofficial could have been contrived in a dark corner of the erection shops at Eastleigh away from official eyes? I think I once saw an outline or weight diagram of such a loco in a book somewhere but can't can't remember exactly, maybe I was hallucinating on steam oil or plastic wield?

That magnificent steam raiser of Bulleid’s could supply three large cylinders at speed so surely it could manage four smaller ones at lower goods train speeds.

I've drawn in the coloured steam bogies with about five foot wheels but there are no dimensions so it's all guess work, plenty of room for the front steam bogie to swivel but I'm not so sure for the rear as there is less play under the tender or maybe just minimal swing to that bogie. The engine and tender would have to be welded up into one long chassis and there is a suggestion of where to put the steam pipes, one on each side, the supply to the rear a little fatter perhaps 10 in diameter?

This could have been a quick and viable alternative to the Leader class, no new untried technology to cause trouble. Imagine such a loco on the difficult and heavy empty carriage trains between the busy London Terminus of Waterloo and the sidings at Clapham Junction and on the fast ballast trains taking granite chips in the giant bogie hoppers from Dartmoor way out west all the way to the East Kent lines 150 or more miles?

Perhaps like the GWR hybrid Dukedogs of the 1930s, this could be a successful lash up of old 0-6-0 frames and pistons fitted up under a modified pacific boiler and tender frame. It could have been secretly concocted at weekends by a few interested foremen and junior but ambitious design engineers, the successful running of the loco would have saved them from any serious disciplinary action. It's unofficial nature is why there are no photos of it but it could have been real, only tested at night so the public and train spotter enthusiasts never found out about it.

The tender sides would need some cutting down to allow better visibility when running in that direction. There are plenty of Bulleid locos surviving so perhaps one could be created today?

Edited February 21, 2019 by relaxinghobby
wrong thread

[RLBH]

As the perennial subject of fully-braked bogie goods wagons to justify the existence of big locomotives has come up once again, some thoughts on the matter.

 

Someone would obviously have to establish standards, and I would imagine that in pre-privatisation days that someone would be the Railway Clearing House as they had done before. Initially, I'd think the push would come about to handle express goods on the longer distance routes, which one company (possibly the LMS, post-1922) would likely lead on. Air braking is an interesting possibility - if a new fleet of fully braked goods wagons, initially for express freight purposes, was introduced, the relative cost might be more palatable. I don't think anyone ever argued that air braking wasn't better, only that vacuum was cheaper.

 

The obvious stuff - vans, open wagons, mineral wagons of varying kinds - are easy to imagine. In general, I go to the 1960s-1970s long wheelbase wagons for reference, stretch them slightly, and put them on 8' 6" wheelbase bogies. Overall length of 40 to 45 feet seems to be reasonable for most types of wagon. The eventual creation of bogie cattle wagons is an interesting thought - could a 40-foot long cattle wagon be effectively loaded from one set of centre doors?

[AlfaZagato]

American cattle-cars were loaded from center doors, and that was often Longhorns, too.

[BernardTPM]

Vacuum braking was easy with steam locomotives and ejectors were relatively low maintenance items, indeed there were less air-braked vehicles in 1947 than there had been in 1922 and later devlopments like A.F.I. showed there was still scope for improving the system so a wholesale switch to air-brakes pre-diesel and electric would be a big ask. Very much like steam heating - easy with a steam loco on the front, much less obvious with diesel or electric traction (indeed much to go wrong, which it often did).

There were some bogie designs around so they would be the obvious starting point for new designs and plenty of bogie goods wagons were exported to places like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

[Mark Saunders]

15 minutes ago, BernardTPM said:

Vacuum braking was easy with steam locomotives and ejectors were relatively low maintenance items, indeed there were less air-braked vehicles in 1947 than there had been in 1922 and later devlopments like A.F.I. showed there was still scope for improving the system so a wholesale switch to air-brakes pre-diesel and electric would be a big ask. Very much like steam heating - easy with a steam loco on the front, much less obvious with diesel or electric traction (indeed much to go wrong, which it often did).

There were some bogie designs around so they would be the obvious starting point for new designs and plenty of bogie goods wagons were exported to places like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

 

The braking system chosen by the railway seems to be dependant on the origin of the railway, as it looks like the British Colonies were using Vacuum brakes and Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) was still using Vacuum in 1967 so it goes that Southern Rhodesia was still the same as the railways were apparently the same in both countries till Rhodesia declared UDI (or IDI as some documents in the National Archive refer to).

 

There were plenty of bogie wagons built by British Builders for export, with photographs in archives of them!

 

Mark Saunders

[Talltim]

I came across this on eBay.

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F163581842149

i imagine bridges might be a problem...

[AlfaZagato]

I know that was just someone's flight of boredom and fancy, but a collapsible jib would get that right down to gauge.

[PhilJ W]

2 minutes ago, AlfaZagato said:

I know that was just someone's flight of boredom and fancy, but a collapsible jib would get that right down to gauge.

Or a telescopic jib. I think axle weight would be the biggest problem though.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

3 hours ago, RLBH said:

As the perennial subject of fully-braked bogie goods wagons to justify the existence of big locomotives has come up once again, some thoughts on the matter.

 

Someone would obviously have to establish standards, and I would imagine that in pre-privatisation days that someone would be the Railway Clearing House as they had done before...

Possibly. But the GNR had the very effective continuous brake fitted bogie brick wagons proven in service, and the design was perpetuated by the LNER. Furthermore the LMS and LNER built bogie wagons to common designs, most notably the Bogie Bolster D, and both knew something about construction of bogie coaches. On which basis had there been demand for higher load capacity express freight services then suitable continuously braked bogie wagon designs would have been developed, and quite possibly on a shared design basis.

[RLBH]

36 minutes ago, 34theletterbetweenB&D said:

Possibly. But the GNR had the very effective continuous brake fitted bogie brick wagons proven in service, and the design was perpetuated by the LNER. Furthermore the LMS and LNER built bogie wagons to common designs, most notably the Bogie Bolster D, and both knew something about construction of bogie coaches. On which basis had there been demand for higher load capacity express freight services then suitable continuously braked bogie wagon designs would have been developed, and quite possibly on a shared design basis.

No doubt you're right. I've no doubt that any standard setting would be done after a decent fleet of wagons had been developed by the railways themselves. There are plenty of standards out there that amount to the regulatory body decreeing that a certain company's standard will be adopted with some cosmetic tweaks.

[johnofwessex]

What about the Europeans though?  They certainly were fully fitted very early on & seemed to use much larger wagons

[Gibbo675]

2 hours ago, Talltim said:

I came across this on eBay.

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F163581842149

i imagine bridges might be a problem...

Hi Tim,

 

That really does need to be on the "Ebay Madness" thread.

 

Gibbo.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

4 hours ago, johnofwessex said:

What about the Europeans though?  They certainly were fully fitted very early on & seemed to use much larger wagons

Which Europeans? (I have always understood that our little archipelago's inhabitants are european.) Since there were wagons with brakeman's cabins for freezing poor brakemen to death still working post WWII, I don't think they were so very much ahead on continuous braking of freight stock. Certainly ahead in adoption of larger wagons, as the volume of trade was greater.

[The Johnster]

Storms in Channel, Continent Isolated...

 

Mainland European freight wagons were larger, longer wheelbase types from early days not because the volume of trade was greater but because most European nations considered them as suitable and to be available for military use in time of war for carrying men or horses.  Hence the ventilators.  Air brakes on the European Mainland were mostly non-automatic, i.e. air pressure was used to apply the brakes like a locomotive or lorry's 'straight air' system, which would release the brakes if the pressure was lost (British air and vacuum brake systems use pressure to keep the brakes off, and are thus 'fail safe' in the sense that the brake automatically applies if pressure is lost for any reason, such as a broken coupling or leaking hose.

 

 

[Zomboid]

Air brakes now might be fail safe, but it wasn't always the case. I think there was a crash involving a SR EMU which occurred because it had set off with no air in the system and was therefore unable to stop.

 

Adoption of proper knuckle couplers for all vehicles 100 years ago would have been a good idea too.

[RLBH]

52 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

Adoption of proper knuckle couplers for all vehicles 100 years ago would have been a good idea too. 

Aye, proper brakes and couplers on decent-sized wagons all go together as necessary conditions for running the kind of train that justifies a big locomotive. Perhaps ironically, the size and expense of such makes running small branch line trains less viable.

[Zomboid]

Not sure on couplers or decent brakes, but larger wagons would definitely impact the economics of branch line freight. I could imagine that leading to earlier adoption of containerisation, so that van-loads would become containers, and you'd get 2 or 3 on a wagon chassis and smaller quantities could be shifted. It would probably have led to a concentration of freight facilities and more local road distribution, which in turn might actually have been beneficial, with less freight infrastructure actually required.

[The Johnster]

I'm not sure that larger wagons would have been the best thing for low volume customers such as are typical of branch lines, Zomboid; the amount of load space that would have been tied up in delivering small loads with the wagon mostly moving fresh air about and kept out of revenue earning traffic while collection or mileage customers hadn't turned up to remove the load is not the most cost effective way to use the wagon.  The branch line situation was to a very large extent loaded in and empty out so far as general merchandise was concerned.  Any local producer of goods which might provide outward loadings tended to have their own sidings.

 

All Glory etc...

[Satan's Goldfish]

Do all imaginary wagons to go with the larger locomotives need to be big bogie versions of their unfitted predecessors? HAA mgr wagons were still 4 wheeled, and there's plenty of 4 wheeled wagons still to be seen in use in long heavy fitted freights on the continent just as a quick couple of examples. So the impact on branch lines that would traditionally have smaller unfitted wagons could be minimal with the right design, but still compatible with the larger faster fitted freight services. Think a much earlier version of speedlink, that still had short 'VEA' vans for certain traffics...

[BernardTPM]

The VEA vans were an example of customer resistance to larger wagons. It should also be bourne in mind that four wheel wagons are cheaper to build than bogie wagons and, if the design is right, may even offer higher relative payloads. The big matter that needed sorting as speeds increased was understanding and eliminating the potential instabilty caused by rail/wheel dynamics (which ironically lead to the APT...).

Edited March 12, 2019 by BernardTPM

[Fat Controller]

I find the American policy for supplying wagons to Europe, during and after the two world wars, interesting.

In the first conflict, the wagons were bogie tanks, opens, flats and vans, generally referred to as the 'TP' (Travaux Publiques) wagons. The flats and tanks had a long life, ending up as engineers' fleet and internal users respectively, and lasting into the early years of the current century.

WW2 saw 4-wheel wagons being supplied instead, with plywood-bodied vans and opens; these did not survive for anything like as long.

I wonder why the policy changed?

[AlfaZagato]

Cost.   WW1 did not cost the US a damn thing.   We had already largely industrialized for the most part, and both labor and material were still pennies on the dollar.   By WW2, we had been through the Great Depression, and our involvement was much higher, so a moving to simpler, cheaper designs was desirable.

[Satan's Goldfish]

'What abomination could be created by mating a mk1 coach to a 6 wheel chassis?' Asked no one. But I gave it a go any way.

 

Here we have an SK, FK (with loo), BSK (with loo), and a BG... all of which look horrific to ride in

 

[Gibbo675]

19 minutes ago, Satan's Goldfish said:

'What abomination could be created by mating a mk1 coach to a 6 wheel chassis?' Asked no one. But I gave it a go any way.

 

Here we have an SK, FK (with loo), BSK (with loo), and a BG... all of which look horrific to ride in

 

Hi Mr Goldfish

 

The bottom set of three remind me of a loco hauled version of this contraption:

 

https://www.railcar.co.uk/type/acv/

 

Gibbo.

[scots region]

25 minutes ago, Satan's Goldfish said:

'What abomination could be created by mating a mk1 coach to a 6 wheel chassis?' Asked no one. But I gave it a go any way.

 

Here we have an SK, FK (with loo), BSK (with loo), and a BG... all of which look horrific to ride in

 

 

Just looking at these made my backache flare up.