If The Pilot Scheme Hadn't Been Botched..........

[TravisM]

I'm probably going to upset a number of people here but I think the pilot scheme was largely driven by the treasury and a certain amount of arrogance in thinking that the UK was the workshop of the world and they knew best.  I don't know of any country that had a "pilot scheme" similar to the UK, though I'm happy to be proven wrong.  The large amounts of money wasted by BR with dithering ideas is well documented and I just wondered, had the big 4 had not been nationalised, I'm pretty sure they would have looked across the pond for ideas.

[JohnR]

8 hours ago, Pandora said:

LMS 10000/10001, BR had several years of several years of operational experience  of the Twins which I believe were reliable units although a little bit underpowered at 1600 bhp.

The 3-axle bogies were a good design,  used on the more powerful  EM2 electric  locos, showing the traction motors had  plenty in reserve to cope with a  higher output diesel engine

Why did the Pilot scheme seemingly disregard  the Twins for unproven designs?

 

Quite. Given that the EE 1750hp engine was out and being tested in 1950 (in the first two Bulleid locos), there was no reason why combining the two shouldnt have resulted in a Class 37 by about 1953, say. And produced in similar numbers. 

[RJS1977]

19 minutes ago, JohnR said:

 

Quite. Given that the EE 1750hp engine was out and being tested in 1950 (in the first two Bulleid locos), there was no reason why combining the two shouldnt have resulted in a Class 37 by about 1953, say. And produced in similar numbers. 

 

Though in the early 50s, the plan was to build one last fleet of steam locos (the Standards) to last until the 1980s, by which time the majority of the network would have been electrified, and disregard diesel power altogether (with the possible exceptions of shunters and branch railcars).

[Titan]

22 minutes ago, JohnR said:

 

Quite. Given that the EE 1750hp engine was out and being tested in 1950 (in the first two Bulleid locos), there was no reason why combining the two shouldnt have resulted in a Class 37 by about 1953, say. And produced in similar numbers. 

 

Not exactly, the 1750hp engine of the time was 16 cylinders, at the time of the pilot scheme the 12 cylinder was at 1,500hp.  It was only in 1960 or so that we got 150hp per cylinder from EE. Never quite sure why the 37 was specified as 1,750hp when the engine itself was a 1,800hp unit. 

Edited October 21, 2021 by Titan

[Nearholmer]

49 minutes ago, jools1959 said:

had the big 4 had not been nationalised, I'm pretty sure they would have looked across the pond for ideas.

They already had. LMS engineers were on the boat to the US as soon as it was possible to go.

 

But, the mission seems to have been to learn, rather than import.

 

49 minutes ago, jools1959 said:

driven by the treasury and a certain amount of arrogance in thinking that the UK was the workshop of the world

 

There treasury fronted the export drive, which applied to all sectors, but the need for it was obvious to, and supported by, “everyone” (doubtless there was somebody who thought it was a bad idea!). The hubris of British industry again seems to have applied to all sectors. We were making beautiful, but iffy, motorbikes, cars, and a stack of other things, let alone locomotives.
 

I love reading old Meccano magazines, and railway trade press, and the self-confidence, and misplaced optimism of the Dan-Dare period comes across on almost every page. With the hindsight knowledge of what happened across British industry from the late 50s to early 70s, it is poignant to see just how blind so many ‘captain’s of industry’ and their cheer-leaders seem to have been to the tsunami heading toward them. It’s way OT, but my view is that a lot of things that rattle around in U.K. politics even today can be traced to a sort of collective PTSD resulting from losing simultaneously an empire, and “the peace”. As a country, we still need counselling.

 

 

Edited October 21, 2021 by Nearholmer

[TravisM]

2 hours ago, RJS1977 said:

 

Though in the early 50s, the plan was to build one last fleet of steam locos (the Standards) to last until the 1980s, by which time the majority of the network would have been electrified, and disregard diesel power altogether (with the possible exceptions of shunters and branch railcars).

Personally, I think BR needed at the time to bite the bullet and gone headlong into electrification with the power supplied by power stations fed by coal.  The 1500V DC OHLE should have been expanded until the 25Kv AC system was established and run both systems like they do in France, and then the standards consigned to remain on paper.

 

Had they gone down this route, I don’t think it would have cost anymore than the amount than the money wasted on the standards and pilot scheme diesel locomotives.  Also, as steam was being replaced, at first the elderly steam loco’s going for scrap and the money used on the electrification project, and with the withdrawal being accelerated, line closures and other cost saving measures, the total would probably have been less than projected.

[Nearholmer]

Capital, lack thereof. It put the whole country in the position of having to be penny-wise, and to sim extent pound-foolish, from 1945-55, not just BR. 
 

The mystery to me is how BR managed to be quite so pound-foolish in diesel loco procurement after 1955, when it did get the capital to invest. Maybe sheer panic played a part, given how appalling the operating losses were becoming by then.

[TheSignalEngineer]

A big factor at the time of the ordering of the Standards was that we were ***** broke as a nation. We had no financial reserves and couldn't afford to buy imports like oil. We didn't have much of a domestic oil industry or experience of building large diesel locomotives. What we did have was enough proven reserves of coal to last for at least 300 years, lots of miners, a large number of railway workshops which had been building steam for 125 years and a domestic steel industry.

Lack of progress on electrification was a political matter. In 1969 I had on my desk a copy of the BR major projects programme. Headquarters prorities 1,2 and 3 were to electrify Weaver Jn to Glasgow, Kings Cross to Edinburgh and Swansea - Birmingham - YorK.

If the wires had been started from Euston would the WCML have ever been finished? It was a smart move from BR to do Manchester to Crewe first as if the job didn't continue it would have been a political embarrassment that even thick skinned Tories could have probably not have lived down.

 

Edited October 21, 2021 by TheSignalEngineer

[cheesysmith]

2 hours ago, Titan said:

 

Not exactly, the 1750hp engine of the time was 16 cylinders, at the time of the pilot scheme the 12 cylinder was at 1,500hp.  It was only in 1960 or so that we got 150hp per cylinder from EE. Never quite sure why the 37 was specified as 1,750hp when the engine itself was a 1,800hp unit. 

 

Actually the CSVT mk1 was only rated at 1750bhp from 16 cylinders. The mk2 as used in 10203 was rated at 2000bhp, and 2400 bhp with intercooling. You could have had a V12 class 37 clone at the beginning of the modernisation program using this engine set to 1800 bhp. But there was a gap in the planned HP range between 1500 and 2000 bhp. You cannot build a loco in this power range if your customer doesn`t even think there is a need.

 

IIRC the engine in the 37 is the CSVT mk2 uprated, as used in the class 50s, and was rated at 2042bhp, being downrated for BR by lower cylinder pressures and rpm. This is one reason for its longevity. In fact the three most reliable EE engines, and the ones that lasted the longest in service were all downrated from their max output, being the 20s, 31s, and 37s.

[Nearholmer]

8 hours ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

Lack of progress on electrification was a political matter

Different factors at different dates, and I think it depends what you mean by “political”.

 

1948-55, as you mention, chronic lack of funds, plus another important thing that I will come back to. Now, the funds could have been found by spending less on other things, slowing down the establishment of the NHS, retarding the school-building programme and/or building fewer houses, but even as a railway electrification engineer I’m more than grateful that they weren’t.

 

The other factor was the question of the system to use. It was very well understood in Britain in 1948 that technology was right on the brink of being able to deliver practical industrial frequency HV a.c. traction, but British industry was not in the forefront, a group of engineers on both sides of the French-German border in Alsace were, and the advice at the time was effectively “see how they get on, and start our own work on this”. The advantages of this nascent system were huge when compared with 1500V dc, so this was, I think, a sound decision. By comparison with the SNCF project, the BR one was a bit slow to start, and make-do-and-mend, but it delivered the knowledge that BR and industry needed.

 

Starting the resultant WCML in the Manchester area was again probably a sound decision, partly because it was on the doorstep of the industry that needed to deliver all the kit, and politically it probably had some benefits as a northern balancer for the Kent Coast scheme.

 

Once WCML was complete (and think how long that took!), there is no question that it is a crying shame that the BR and industrial capability was ‘stood down’ …… even a steady dribble electrification, plodding slowly on over the decades, would have been better than the stop-start, feast then famine, lunacy that followed, and which IMO laid the path to the b@lls-up over costs on GWML and subsequent trimming of plans. Not keeping going was the result of politics, financial politics and organisational-upheaval politics. Big Mistake!

 

 

Edited October 22, 2021 by Nearholmer

[paulbb]

BR did want and did compile a rolling program of electrification around 1980; by then however the Treasury had developed a major distrust of BR's Modrnisation Plan investment choices - underpowered and unreliable diesels, expensive marshalling yards that remained stubbornly empty - that offered a poor return for the taxpayers money.

[Nearholmer]

Agree, up to a point.

 

Yes, when saying “politics” we do have to remember that all the capital comes from taxpayers, who generally don’t much like paying tax, so would rather pay less, and expect that the governments that they elect will ensure that what tax they do pay is spent wisely - and BR had soiled the nest a few times on that score, and at the time had serious labour-relations challenges.

 

But, by 1980 the sins of the past had largely been ‘worked off’, the HST programme was delivering well, and the financial and programme management mess below the waterline of the APT project hadn’t yet become apparent. The dislike of railways by the then new government was deep, and ideological, founded in three things: railways were heavily unionised; railways were collective things, rather than individualistic things; railways were publicly owned …… BR smelled heavily of socialism, and wasn’t to be trusted for that reason, more than any question of track-record.

 

It wasn’t just further 25kV electrification that was turned-down at that period: I remember well how fleet renewal and associated electrification upgrade on the southern, for which form and costed plans were put forward, was rejected too, leaving the suburban system to moulder for another decade, then get mired in Railtrack incompetence after privatisation.

 

The decisions made c1980 not to spend on electrification and traction big-time, cast long shadows. But, Priority 1 for the government was the unions, not investment.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 22, 2021 by Nearholmer

[rodent279]

The AC electrification part of the Modernisation Plan, or the bits that were completed, BR got it more "right" than the dieselisation part of it. It wasn't without it's  ~failures~ problems-rectifying high voltage, high current AC using an arc struck on a pool of mercury was always going to be problematic in a moving loco.

Edited October 27, 2021 by rodent279

[Nearholmer]

Using MA rectifiers was about the only viable option at the very beginning, so I don’t think they can be counted as a mistake - the 1947/48 electrification report acknowledges (a) that they were a non-ideal technology, and (b) that it would take a while to achieve solid-state rectifiers of the necessary power and reliability. The AM1 sets were fitted with MA, but they got a solid-state rectifier into one as soon as they could. 
 

SNCF went through the same grief, and tried other convertor systems too ……. It was the core of the “make industrial frequency electrification practical” problem.

 

I never worked on the locos, but I did work on the substation-based rectifiers that had been installed on Kent Coast, and that scheme displayed exactly the same history: it started with lots of small MAs, then went through germanium rectifiers with vast numbers of small, fragile diodes. It took a good few years for industry anywhere to get to high-power/voltage silicon diodes.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 22, 2021 by Nearholmer

[rodent279]

I guess not a failure then as such, just a limitation of the technology?

Did MS-W also have MA rectifiers in the feeder stations? Or were rotary converters used?

[Nearholmer]

I’m 99% sure MSW had MA rectifiers - rotary converters were ‘dead tech’ by the mid-1930s (Brighton Line in 1932/33 was the first big application of MA to traction in Britain), but I’d need to check to be 100% sure.

[rodent279]

10 hours ago, cheesysmith said:

 

Actually the CSVT mk1 was only rated at 1750bhp from 16 cylinders. The mk2 as used in 10203 was rated at 2000bhp, and 2400 bhp with intercooling. You could have had a V12 class 37 clone at the beginning of the modernisation program using this engine set to 1800 bhp. But there was a gap in the planned HP range between 1500 and 2000 bhp. You cannot build a loco in this power range if your customer doesn`t even think there is a need.

 

IIRC the engine in the 37 is the CSVT mk2 uprated, as used in the class 50s, and was rated at 2042bhp, being downrated for BR by lower cylinder pressures and rpm. This is one reason for its longevity. In fact the three most reliable EE engines, and the ones that lasted the longest in service were all downrated from their max output, being the 20s, 31s, and 37s.

Yes, except that the engine in the class 50 was the 16cyl version. More or less an intercooled version of a class 40 engine, with many interchangeable components, but with detail differences.

[kevinlms]

On 21/10/2021 at 03:47, Nearholmer said:

 

Thereafter: keep pushing engine power/weight ratio, and be prepared to swap-out engine, generator, and maybe traction motors to up-rate locos, and timetable performance, progressively. In short, sell-off or throw away out-classed engines, not entire failed classes of locos.

 

 

This was something alien to most railway companies. They had long treated steam locos as being individual pieces of equipment and took locos apart, repaired them part by part, then reassembled them to be the same working loco.

 

Some railways had built spare large items, notably boilers, so that in theory, any boiler could be used to reassemble a loco, because these important pieces of equipment took longer to repair than many other parts of the loco, thus delaying time to complete.

 

The LNWR had long realised that you didn't need a tender for each loco of a class, because the time taken to repair, was much less than the time taken for the loco itself. So you could attach ANY suitable tender, not just the one it came in with.

 

Exchange components was the practice and while BR did that to some degree, it wasn't something used as often as it ought to have been.

[kevinlms]

13 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

 

I love reading old Meccano magazines, and railway trade press, and the self-confidence, and misplaced optimism of the Dan-Dare period comes across on almost every page. With the hindsight knowledge of what happened across British industry from the late 50s to early 70s, it is poignant to see just how blind so many ‘captain’s of industry’ and their cheer-leaders seem to have been to the tsunami heading toward them. It’s way OT, but my view is that a lot of things that rattle around in U.K. politics even today can be traced to a sort of collective PTSD resulting from losing simultaneously an empire, and “the peace”. As a country, we still need counselling.

 

 

Which is called B*****!

 

But going back to what you said about British exports. Stuff like the Victorian Railways R Class 4-6-4s, needed a fair bit of work to get them working properly.

[Allegheny1600]

56 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

Which is called B*****!

 

But going back to what you said about British exports. Stuff like the Victorian Railways R Class 4-6-4s, needed a fair bit of work to get them working properly.

From the “down under” perspective, just how many of the things that were imported from UK plc, worked well out of the box, as it were?

Sorry to go OT.

[Titan]

1 hour ago, kevinlms said:

Which is called B*****!

 

But going back to what you said about British exports. Stuff like the Victorian Railways R Class 4-6-4s, needed a fair bit of work to get them working properly.

 

I think that was because they were built by North British.  Their quality had deteriorated so much that they could not build decent steam locos anymore, let alone diesels.

[62613]

14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

They already had. LMS engineers were on the boat to the US as soon as it was possible to go.

 

But, the mission seems to have been to learn, rather than import.

 

 

There treasury fronted the export drive, which applied to all sectors, but the need for it was obvious to, and supported by, “everyone” (doubtless there was somebody who thought it was a bad idea!). The hubris of British industry again seems to have applied to all sectors. We were making beautiful, but iffy, motorbikes, cars, and a stack of other things, let alone locomotives.
 

I love reading old Meccano magazines, and railway trade press, and the self-confidence, and misplaced optimism of the Dan-Dare period comes across on almost every page. With the hindsight knowledge of what happened across British industry from the late 50s to early 70s, it is poignant to see just how blind so many ‘captain’s of industry’ and their cheer-leaders seem to have been to the tsunami heading toward them. It’s way OT, but my view is that a lot of things that rattle around in U.K. politics even today can be traced to a sort of collective PTSD resulting from losing simultaneously an empire, and “the peace”. As a country, we still need counselling.

 

Waay off topic: one US Secretary of State (Acheson?) reckoned (in the 50s) that the UK had "Lost an empire and was looking for a new role in the world"; 60 years on, his words are still true.

 

[62613]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Agree, up to a point.

 

Yes, when saying “politics” we do have to remember that all the capital comes from taxpayers, who generally don’t much like paying tax, so would rather pay less, and expect that the governments that they elect will ensure that what tax they do pay is spent wisely - and BR had soiled the nest a few times on that score, and at the time had serious labour-relations challenges.

 

But, by 1980 the sins of the past had largely been ‘worked off’, the HST programme was delivering well, and the financial and programme management mess below the waterline of the APT project hadn’t yet become apparent. The dislike of railways by the then new government was deep, and ideological, founded in three things: railways were heavily unionised; railways were collective things, rather than individualistic things; railways were publicly owned …… BR smelled heavily of socialism, and wasn’t to be trusted for that reason, more than any question of track-record.

 

It wasn’t just further 25kV electrification that was turned-down at that period: I remember well how fleet renewal and associated electrification upgrade on the southern, for which form and costed plans were put forward, was rejected too, leaving the suburban system to moulder for another decade, then get mired in Railtrack incompetence after privatisation.

 

The decisions made c1980 not to spend on electrification and traction big-time, cast long shadows. But, Priority 1 for the government was the unions, not investment.

 

 

 

 

BR were told by the treasury to go to the financial markets to find the money for the modernisation plan, and not at preferential rates, either!

[Nearholmer]

Ah, yes, I remember than now you say.

[kevinlms]

3 hours ago, Allegheny1600 said:

From the “down under” perspective, just how many of the things that were imported from UK plc, worked well out of the box, as it were?

Sorry to go OT.

The main problem was that significant rust had set in during the sea voyage. Surely it ought to be possible to reduce the effects of rust - paint?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Railways_R_class#Production