Imaginary Locomotives

[PhilJ W]

12 minutes ago, melmerby said:

NO! Just imagining someone could make one that works OK.

Plenty of dud choice to choose from

L&Y, LTSR, LB&SC etc.

The 4-6-0s they were derived from/morphed into seem to be better machines.

The LT&SR ones were not that bad but the GER banned them from Fenchurch Street ostensibly due to their weight but possibly due to the GER being a bit miffed at the Midland for snatching the LT&SR from under their noses. As a consequence the Midland, what with their small engine policy didn't really want them.

[brack]

4 hours ago, melmerby said:

Or reduce the driving wheels to 6' 0" stick on tanks and a rear bogie for a 4-6-4T fast outer suburban loco.

 

A bit like Whiteleggs GSWR loco.

Just a stretched H1 with an extra pair of drivers?

 

 

Should be an easy photoshop job for someone. I know they only had 5'9" wheels, but they were all rebuilt to pacifics anyway.

 

As for successful Baltic tanks? I'd say the county donegal ones did rather well, and the county down ones have something about them (visually at least), a shame they didn't put one of those in cultra with the Atlantic tank.

 

[john new]

On 01/06/2019 at 13:42, brack said:

Regarding the reboilering of the A2, lner.info suggests this was done to create a spare A2 boiler for the other four (rather than have one out of traffic for a significant time whilst a boiler was being fixed). This suggests to me that they were needed at the time to fill the requirements of the timetable and they couldn't afford to lose one for long periods.

Presumably for new locos a spare boiler wasn't a priority, but at some point down the line you'd assume they would've needed to consider providing one, by which time (5 years) gresley had decided not to sanction the investment in new parts for a non standard class that would be phased out? Is this as much a factor in the reboilering experiment as the claimed attempt to address steaming troubles?

Or more likely a sensible combination of both.

 

Loco type with boiler A on chassis B (The Raven A2 City class) does not perform as well as the Gresley equivalent C&D combination. You fit a boiler C (known satisfactory performance) onto chassis B. If the C&B combination is no better it confirms what you were fairly sure of that steam raising was not the issue, thus proving it is aspects of the chassis B design is the problem (steam use).

 

In the short term you lose very little as the spare boiler type A ups the availability of the City class for traffic as you have the spare boiler. Even if the experiment fails, i.e. the adapted loco is no better, you have a slight improvement to the status-quo through faster works time due to the spare boiler lasting until the time the A2s need heavy overhauls/rebuild to cure the problem in the chassis design.

 

My understanding is that the experiment showed the Raven boiler was as good as, if not better than, the standard LNER pacific boiler confirming the front end layout of the locos was their shortcoming. The rebuild was therefore successful, it upped the availability of the City class A2s in the short-term and confirmed replacing the City class (type A&B) with Gresley's when they wore out as the cost of scrapping/replacement was justified against the cost of a heavy overhaul/rebuild.

[RLBH]

On 01/06/2019 at 21:04, melmerby said:

NO! Just imagining someone could make one that works OK.

Plenty of dud choice to choose from

L&Y, LTSR, LB&SC etc.

The 4-6-0s they were derived from/morphed into seem to be better machines.

 

From what I understand, the LB&SCR L class were perfectly satisfactory, once teething issues had been dealt with, and were only converted to 4-6-0s when they were made redundant in their original role by electrification. Not perfect, to be sure, but basically sound machines that did the job that was asked of them well and justified rebuilding once that job went away.

 

17 hours ago, john new said:

 

Loco type with boiler A on chassis B (The Raven A2 City class) does not perform as well as the Gresley equivalent C&D combination. You fit a boiler C (known satisfactory performance) onto chassis B. If the C&B combination is no better it confirms what you were fairly sure of that steam raising was not the issue, thus proving it is aspects of the chassis B design is the problem (steam use).

 

That line of thought rather suggests trying the experiment the other way around - put a Raven boiler on a Gresley frame and front end. I'm not sure why you'd bother in practice, but it would be an unusual looking machine anyway.

[The Johnster]

The LBSC Baltics were converted to tender 4-6-0s in the wake of the Sevenoaks accident in 1927, after which it became Southern Railway policy not to use tank loco for fast passenger work; the Rivers were similarly converted to moguls.  The expanding electrified network made tender engines, with greater 'range' because of the increased coal and water capacity, more useful anyway.  They seem to have performed quite satisfactorily as tender locos, so there was presumably no inherent weakness in the original design.

 

Large tank locos were used again on Southern Region for fast outer suburban passenger work almost immediately after Nationalisation, LMS designed 2-6-4 tanks preceding the Brighton designed and built BR standard class 4MT tanks.  The Southern has a lot of semi fast and fast outer suburban work that suited large tank engines, and it is a matter of debate that suspending their use after Sevenoaks (the Rivers were withdrawn from service by the end of the day of the accident) may have been a knee-jerk response that prevented the railway using the best suited locos for the work for the next 20 years. 

Edited June 3, 2019 by The Johnster

[melmerby]

In theory a Baltic tank should be a good proposition.

A bogie each end for equaly stable forwards/reverse running, well balanced weight distribution etc.

However in the end the 2-6-4T & 2-6-2T won out in the UK.

[Kelly]

Iirc, the state of the track work played a part in the decision too. The inherited lbscr and secr lines were in places built on the cheap,  especially the ser iirc 

[DavidB-AU]

On 02/06/2019 at 02:28, Compound2632 said:

 

Not sure that's a recommendation. Any instance of an outstanding 4-6-4T?

 

I would argue that DRG 61 001 was an outstanding 4-6-4T. It was tested up to 175 km/h and ran at 160 km/h in regular service, with express timings between Berlin and Dresden that are faster than today's Eurocity trains.

 

Cheers

David

[john new]

And several Baltic electrics worldwide. 13 for the NER never got the chance to prove itself.

[Traintresta]

On 01/06/2019 at 14:19, The Johnster said:

As the thread is for imaginary locos, how about a Raven Atlantic derived prairie to precede the V2s...

I like the idea of doing this but with the wide firebox. Could also do the same for the proposed GCR Pacific. 

 

On 02/06/2019 at 18:15, john new said:

Or more likely a sensible combination of both.

 

Loco type with boiler A on chassis B (The Raven A2 City class) does not perform as well as the Gresley equivalent C&D combination. You fit a boiler C (known satisfactory performance) onto chassis B. If the C&B combination is no better it confirms what you were fairly sure of that steam raising was not the issue, thus proving it is aspects of the chassis B design is the problem (steam use).

 

In the short term you lose very little as the spare boiler type A ups the availability of the City class for traffic as you have the spare boiler. Even if the experiment fails, i.e. the adapted loco is no better, you have a slight improvement to the status-quo through faster works time due to the spare boiler lasting until the time the A2s need heavy overhauls/rebuild to cure the problem in the chassis design.

 

My understanding is that the experiment showed the Raven boiler was as good as, if not better than, the standard LNER pacific boiler confirming the front end layout of the locos was their shortcoming. The rebuild was therefore successful, it upped the availability of the City class A2s in the short-term and confirmed replacing the City class (type A&B) with Gresley's when they wore out as the cost of scrapping/replacement was justified against the cost of a heavy overhaul/rebuild.

I also got the impression that the Raven boiler was as good if not better than the Gresley one, this could have been an interesting experiment. Perhaps one of these boilers could have worked in the rebuilt W1?

 

Interesting that raven built a good boiler but couldn’t match it with a front end. Robinson built a modern front end but a poor steaming boiler because of the insistence on a grate no bigger than 26sq/ft.  Those that wonder what might have been had either of these two taken charge before Gresley got his turn might have their answer. 

Edited June 4, 2019 by Traintresta

[The Johnster]

I think the LNER made the right choice with Gresley, and the others were close to retiring anyway.  This is related to the crux of a problem that was affecting all of the British railways between the turn of the 20th century and the grouping; loads were increasing exponentially and bigger engines were needed.  At the beginning of the period nearly all of them had inside cylinder 4-4-0s for fast passenger work, and a few had singles for lightweight very fast work, and inside cylinder 0-6-0s for everything else. sturdy, reliable engines but soon to be floundering with heavier trains. 

 

Traffic increased so trains got longer, and coaches were now heavier bogie gangwayed designs that gave access to restaurant cars so there were no more extended stops for passenger refreshments.  Longer non stop runs were possible, and the increased need to find paths encouraged increased speeds for the timetables.  By 1922 Pacifics were needed for the ECML (and arguably for the WCML as well but nobody thought of it much beyond general arrrangement drawings at the time.

 

Designers who had cut their teeth on 4-4-0s and 0-6-0s were asked for more powerful versions, and there were basically two ways to extend the 4-4-0s.  Much work was done with compounding and superheating to try and beef them up, but ultimately they were still too small for the 1920s railway.  You could make a 4-6-0, which the GW and LNW did with success, but there is a limit to how far this can be taken imposed by the firebox, which must be narrow to fit between the rear drivers, which in turn limits the size of the boiler.  Or you can extend your 4-4-0 and it's 'matching' single into an atlantic, which means you can have a shorter fatter firebox and a bigger boiler.  By 1923, your atlantics are starting to struggle with the ever increasing loads and you are building pacifics on the East Coast.  

 

Multiple cylinder layouts had become necessary for fast passenger locos at the same time, because there was only a certain amount of steam that two can deal with from the new bigger boilers and they are needed anyway for most types of compounding.  The size of the boilers is becoming a problem, and you are having to go very near the limits of the loading gauge, which means your drivers have restricted views ahead and steam drifts down around the boiler from the stubby little chimneys, worsening the problem which will eventually necessitate smoke deflectors, Bugatti front ends, and wind tunnel testing, but we're not quite there yet...  Gresley has already proved his worth and the he is a safe pair of hands with a big boiler fed by a wide firebox, though, with the K3 Moguls

 

1923 is a bit of a turning point, accentuated by the grouping which inevitably meant that some lines of development, including Raven's and Robinson's, were ended.  Fowler's, in so much as he can be blamed personally for it, lasted longer than it perhaps should have and led to the continuation of good but inadequate locos for the west coast companies.  He had to go for a 4-6-0 in the end, the Royal Scot, which wasn't as good as the LMS made it out to be at the time; Castles proved superior and King Arthurs were probably better as well.  As proved by the later rebuild, the Scots were limited by the boilers.  The GW managed with Castles to the end of steam, and you could argue that their adequacy hampered further effective development at Swindon, with the Kings too route restricted to be of the value they could have been otherwise.  

 

Similarly, the 0-6-0s had to be 'embiggened', into Moguls for mixed traffic (a new category; it used to be called 'goods', as opposed to 'mineral') and into 8-coupled machines for heavy mineral work.  The smaller wheels meant that fitting the fireboxes in was less of an issue, but the LMS enlarged the 4F into the 7F, and it's failure can be looked at as stretching the Victorian inside cylindered 0-6-0 a step too far.  The L & Y and arguably the LNWR made similar errors; again, the root cause is a failure of Victorian-minded designers to cope with and adapt to new conditions.  

 

Innovation was what was needed and the culture did not promote it; small c conservatism and large C complacency were in abundance.  Churchward broke the mould a bit, and was followed in this, but not in the same direction, by Gresley; both men significantly looked abroad for new ideas and adapted them well to UK practice.   Maunsell did some very good work on the Southern; he was a pragmatist and very concerned with detail design to make building, maintaining, and preparing his engines easier for his men.  This was the sort of thinking that became more important after WW2, and he was perhaps ahead of his time.  Urie's mixed traffic 4-6-0s were also very advanced for their time.  

 

An unexpected success was the B12 inside cylinder 4-6-0, an extended Victorian 4-4-0 but a very good one for secondary passenger duties.

 

 

[Allegheny1600]

7 hours ago, DavidB-AU said:

 

I would argue that DRG 61 001 was an outstanding 4-6-4T. It was tested up to 175 km/h and ran at 160 km/h in regular service, with express timings between Berlin and Dresden that are faster than today's Eurocity trains.

 

Cheers

David

Not to mention the approx 530 members of the Prussian T18, later BR78 in service from 1912 - 1975 all over Europe.

Not especially fast at 100Km/h but sufficiently useful to serve in it's designed capacity for a very long time.

[Compound2632]

4 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Traffic increased so trains got longer, and coaches were now heavier bogie gangwayed designs that gave access to restaurant cars so there were no more extended stops for passenger refreshments.  Longer non stop runs were possible, and the increased need to find paths encouraged increased speeds for the timetables.  

 

Similarly, the 0-6-0s had to be 'embiggened', into Moguls for mixed traffic (a new category; it used to be called 'goods', as opposed to 'mineral') 

 

I'm just going to nit-pick a couple of points.

 

Was long-distance passenger traffic actually increasing, or was it simply a case of train weight per passenger increasing as a result of competition in facilities: corridor carriages, dining cars, etc.? It's notable that the Midland, hampered in the introduction of larger engines by its infrastructure, went in for dining passengers travelling all the way in the dining carriage, thereby helping to keep train weight down.

 

Victorian 0-6-0s can be divided into two categories: mineral engines, with smaller wheels and not equipped with train brakes, whether Westinghouse or AVB; and what were effectively mixed-traffic engines, generally with larger wheels (5'3"-ish) and equipped with train brakes so they could be (and were) used on both goods and passenger trains. The mixed-traffic concept was not new, it was simply that more powerful engines that could run faster were called for. (Equally, plenty of Victorian 4-4-0s put in good work on express goods trains, generally undercover of darkness.)

 

[The Johnster]

No argument from me about Victorian engines cascaded from main line work; many continued to give good value for money for years afterwards. What the Victorians called ‘goods’ engines as opposed to smaller wheeled minerals were effectively the mixed traffic locos of their day. 

 

I’d say there was a double whammy of increasing loads caused both by heavier stock (especially after wooden underframes fell out of favour) and by increasing demands as improving social conditions broadened the market for travel.  How much of this was long distance is debatable.  But the nation’s population was growing steadily as infant death rates fell, as well as increased wealth and employment; more people wanted to travel more on more and heavier trains.  

[62613]

Cecil J. Allen has pointed out in a book (The London and North-Eastern Railway, about 1969) that the cylinders and valve chests of the Raven pacifics were manufactured as a single casting, and that after the advantages of long-lap, long-travel valves had been shown after the 1925 exchange between GWR "Castles" and LNER A1s, that similar modifications to them were too costly to modify. Clay and Cliffe (The LNER 4-6-0 Classes) have pointed out the difficulties of fitting a decent-sized ashpan to a large-wheeled, large-boilered 4-6-0. I know the GWR managed it, but they seem to have been the exception. It may account for the indifferent steaming of some of the early express passenger 4-6-0s, as they reached the end of a trip.

 

[Gilwell Park]

Hi.  I acquired my first GE section loco when triang introduced their B12.  The only way to get companion locos at that time was by conversion so a D16 was made by putting a shortened B12 body on a Triang L1 chassis. A J19 followed by a shortened B12 boiler cab on a Triang 3F footplate & chassis. A B17 followed with a B12 boiler & cab on a shortened A3 chassis & footplate. Over the years these have all been replaced by better RtR models & kit building. However I still like the idea of conversions, and having been fascinated by the GCR A5 tank I got out the razor saw & stanley knife plus plasticard to produce a GER A9 tank. The theory is that the GER seeing how efficient the west side suburban services were being run with tank engines decided to do the same with the east side suburban services,primarily the Southends. The result was a 4-6-2T based on the original B12 but with smaller driving wheels. Originally belpaire boilers were fitted but replaced by round top in the late 1940's. It is basically a very old Triang chassis & boiler unit married to a Bachmann V1 cab & bunker.

 

[melmerby]

Why the scrolling text?

[Compound2632]

3 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Why the scrolling text?

 

Or even, how?

Edited June 7, 2019 by Compound2632

[melmerby]

9 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Or even, how?

HTML I presume.

https://www.quackit.com/html/codes/html_scroll_box.cfm

[melmerby]

<div style="height:120px;width:120px;border:1px solid #ccc;font:16px/26px Georgia, Garamond, Serif;overflow:auto;">
As you can see, once there's enough text in this box, the box will grow scroll bars... that's why we call it a scroll box! You could also place an image into the scroll box.
</div>

 

Edited June 7, 2019 by melmerby

[Gilwell Park]

Quote

Not sure why it did that, never happened before.

 

[Gibbo675]

Hi Folks,

 

Here is a Triang Transcontinetal Switcher that is part way through being bashed into a British hump shunter. I think of it as a proper purpose built class 13 instead of a pair of class 08's lashed together.

 

The body has been shortened by about 60mm and the cab doors have been set at opposite corners in the blank space where there were no doors previously. The cab spectacle plate windows have been opened out and the doors carved off the short end. The bogies are from a Mantua Tyco contraption that had bogies that looked like the ones Triang fitted originally, although I only ever had the body shell.

 

The locomotive will eventually be fitted with large Oleo buffers and painted in BR Blue with black and yellow wasp stripe ends.

 

 

 

Gibbo.

[AlfaZagato]

Looks like Triang was trying to make an Alco.   Maybe an idea if you want builders plates?

[PhilJ W]

48 minutes ago, AlfaZagato said:

Looks like Triang was trying to make an Alco.   Maybe an idea if you want builders plates?

The old Triang model was based on an Alco.

 

[rodent279]

10 hours ago, Gibbo675 said:

Hi Folks,

 

Here is a Triang Transcontinetal Switcher that is part way through being bashed into a British hump shunter. I think of it as a proper purpose built class 13 instead of a pair of class 08's lashed together.

 

The body has been shortened by about 60mm and the cab doors have been set at opposite corners in the blank space where there were no doors previously. The cab spectacle plate windows have been opened out and the doors carved off the short end. The bogies are from a Mantua Tyco contraption that had bogies that looked like the ones Triang fitted originally, although I only ever had the body shell.

 

The locomotive will eventually be fitted with large Oleo buffers and painted in BR Blue with black and yellow wasp stripe ends.

 

 

 

Gibbo.

I like that. I used to have one of those. It could shift pretty well, many happy hours spent in my youth watching it flying round an oval with a couple of BR Mk1's!