Jump to content
 

Please use M,M&M only for topics that do not fit within other forum areas. All topics posted here await admin team approval to ensure they don't belong elsewhere.

Imaginary Locomotives


Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, Rockalaucher101 said:

I thought W1 was a 4-6-2-2

 

Looking up W1 on the LNER Information website   https://www.lner.info/locos/W/w1.php  It seems that the original proposal was for a 4-6-2, but this was increased by adding an additional trailing axle as the design evolved. The proposal for an actual trailing bogie, was not acted upon, either during original construction or the subsequent rebuild. 

 

 

  • Informative/Useful 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium
12 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

Or one of those divided-drive contraptions which Webb, although no one else, regarded as the way forward...

 

Drummond had a go at a non-compound double-single - LSWR classes T7 and E10 (six locomotives). The big advantage was a larger grate area than was feasible with the length of coupling rod he was happy using.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold
3 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

My personal belief is that the LMS and LNER 4-6-2, and LNER 2-8-2 types, and subsequent BR 4-6-2 and 2-10-0 types  represent the maximum practical limits of the British steam locomotive; locos in the 85-105 tonne range hauling 3 or 4 axle tenders holding 7-9 tons of coal.

Most British main lines had loops and refuge sidings that could hold a train of 60 standard length (9 or 10' wheelbase) wagons including the brake van and allowing for two locos, and signalling clearing points and overlaps were assessed on this basis.  Longer trains were certainly used, especially on the London bound coal hauls and the return empties, 90 or 100 wagons Peterborough-New Holland, Toton-Cricklewood, Severn Tunnel Jc or Stoke Gifford-Acton.  Other places such as the relief lines between STJ and Cardiff Tidal allowed longer trains as well.  But these were catered for in the relevant Sectional Appendices, and special instructions were issued to signal boxes as to where these trains could be stopped,

 

So, there was little need for locos capable of moving more than 100 coal wagons, 2,100tons gross, at more than 25mph, and by and large no need for more than 60, 1,260 tons gross.  Edwardian 8-coupled locos were capable of this, and some were specialised like Gresley's 3 cylinder types and boosters for smooth starting.  On the Midland, they put as many little 0-6-0s as were needed to pull the trains and then complained it was inefficient and ordered Beyer-Garratts.  

 

There was a need for a fast heavy freight loco that was not really addressed until the advent of the 9Fs, thought the 47xx were an early attempt hobbled by poor route availability; the original design used the no.1 boiler which proved inadequate for the demands of the cylinders and was replaced by a heavier bigger one. In the meantime, mixed traffic 4-6-0s, and pacifics or V2s on the ECML fish trains, managed, though these were reckoned some of the toughest jobs in the country and close to the limit of what could be expected of human firemen.  They were in some ways precursors to BR's express overnight freights like the infamous 'Condor', and 3 9Fs were fitted with mechanical stokers for a very heavy turn out of Saltley and Carlisle.  60 loaded vans might be a 960 ton gross trailing load, to run at 60mph, reputedly higher with the ECML fish trains.

 

In the US the game was different.  Trains were longer, operated at higher speeds because of their air brakes and bogies, and many railways had long stretches of single track which necessitated the longes heaviest trains possible to maximise the use of the available paths.  Rail was heavier and the loading gauge much larger, so massive locos could be built, with huge mechanically fired fireboxes to feed steam to boilers that could produce sufficient steam to supply multiple cylinders big enough to hold the works xmas dance in.  Even where routes were double track locos like the 2-8-4 illustrated were used; wide firebox, huge cylinders, roller bearings, 2.000 tons or more at 80mph.

 

Awesome.  But there was no need for it in the UK until the late 60s when more block freight trains became the norm and by that time 2nd generation diesels were available.  The most common was the 47, which did the same level of work as the Edwardian 8-coupled locos, but at 60mph, or 90 for Freightliners.  I reckon the capacity of a 47 or Peak in freight work is roughly comparable to a 9F.

13 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

982F9B04-6B6D-47BD-808E-56C2A7A1C11B.jpeg.864c6a84b9b45829df58c9a070a989c4.jpeg

Is that Winstanley's Eddystone Lighthouse, with the upperworks of HMS Dreadnought?  Now, if Hornby made that sort of steampunk I'd be interested...

 

I'd expect the clocks to show different times, though.

  • Like 3
  • Informative/Useful 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium
1 minute ago, The Johnster said:

But usually piloted by smaller ones.

 

Only in boiler size and pressure. They were all 8'0" + 8'6" wheelbase with 18" x 26" cylinders and 5′2½″ drivers, apart from a relatively small group with 4′10½″ drivers and another group with 18½″ × 26″ cylinders, and the superheater Class 4 engines with 20" x 26" cylinders.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Most British main lines had loops and refuge sidings that could hold a train of 60 standard length (9 or 10' wheelbase) wagons including the brake van and allowing for two locos, and signalling clearing points and overlaps were assessed on this basis.  Longer trains were certainly used, especially on the London bound coal hauls and the return empties, 90 or 100 wagons Peterborough-New Holland, Toton-Cricklewood, Severn Tunnel Jc or Stoke Gifford-Acton.  Other places such as the relief lines between STJ and Cardiff Tidal allowed longer trains as well.  But these were catered for in the relevant Sectional Appendices, and special instructions were issued to signal boxes as to where these trains could be stopped,

 

So, there was little need for locos capable of moving more than 100 coal wagons, 2,100tons gross, at more than 25mph, and by and large no need for more than 60, 1,260 tons gross.  Edwardian 8-coupled locos were capable of this, and some were specialised like Gresley's 3 cylinder types and boosters for smooth starting.  On the Midland, they put as many little 0-6-0s as were needed to pull the trains and then complained it was inefficient and ordered Beyer-Garratts.  

 

There was a need for a fast heavy freight loco that was not really addressed until the advent of the 9Fs, thought the 47xx were an early attempt hobbled by poor route availability; the original design used the no.1 boiler which proved inadequate for the demands of the cylinders and was replaced by a heavier bigger one. In the meantime, mixed traffic 4-6-0s, and pacifics or V2s on the ECML fish trains, managed, though these were reckoned some of the toughest jobs in the country and close to the limit of what could be expected of human firemen.  They were in some ways precursors to BR's express overnight freights like the infamous 'Condor', and 3 9Fs were fitted with mechanical stokers for a very heavy turn out of Saltley and Carlisle.  60 loaded vans might be a 960 ton gross trailing load, to run at 60mph, reputedly higher with the ECML fish trains.

 

In the US the game was different.  Trains were longer, operated at higher speeds because of their air brakes and bogies, and many railways had long stretches of single track which necessitated the longes heaviest trains possible to maximise the use of the available paths.  Rail was heavier and the loading gauge much larger, so massive locos could be built, with huge mechanically fired fireboxes to feed steam to boilers that could produce sufficient steam to supply multiple cylinders big enough to hold the works xmas dance in.  Even where routes were double track locos like the 2-8-4 illustrated were used; wide firebox, huge cylinders, roller bearings, 2.000 tons or more at 80mph.

 

Awesome.  But there was no need for it in the UK until the late 60s when more block freight trains became the norm and by that time 2nd generation diesels were available.  The most common was the 47, which did the same level of work as the Edwardian 8-coupled locos, but at 60mph, or 90 for Freightliners.  I reckon the capacity of a 47 or Peak in freight work is roughly comparable to a 9F.

Is that Winstanley's Eddystone Lighthouse, with the upperworks of HMS Dreadnought?  Now, if Hornby made that sort of steampunk I'd be interested...

 

I'd expect the clocks to show different times, though.

 

I’m not quite sure what point you are making, here. It doesn’t seem to address whether British steam practice was capable of further development, within the constraints of the network - loading gauge, rolling stock, traffic patterns. 

 

There are two separate questions. 

 

1) COULD British steam locomotive practice have been further developed, within the constraints of the network?

2) If YES, would it have been useful to do so? 

 

I submit that the answer to (1) is NO, that (as in the USA) steam locomotive development was effectively at an end by the mid to late 1930s, and that there is nothing new about the Standard designs - they are simply a management solution to the problem of a large fleet of locomotives, comprising far too many types, many of them at or beyond their economic working lives; and that your answer is actually the answer to (2), that without major changes to rolling stock there was no useful purpose in further developing steam in any case. 

  • Like 2
  • Agree 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium

Doesn't have to be bigger to be better. For instance, could this:

image.png.faff36ce83d03e327443c3ac768d0401.png

have been developed to the point at which it was as efficient and cost-effective as a DMU, rather than being left to wheeze its days out with progressively not-quite-so-ancient driving trailers?

 

The Midland didn't really think so. It was already experimenting with this:

image.png.5d459088586cdcc10689f7f4bfeca0f5.png

NRM DY 1269, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence by the National Railway Museum.

  • Like 4
Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi all! I’ve been following this thread for a while now, as I take great interest in ‘what-if’ and imaginary locomotives. I decided to have a go at editing one for myself - this is my first attempt at such a thing, so apologies if some editing skills are sub-standard in comparison to some of the great things I have seen here so far.

 

This uses some imagination to create a scenario in which around 1965, British Railways is in need of a new yard shunter class (heaven knows why, they already have about 12 classes of such a thing!). Having seen the work of Ruston and Hornsby, a prolific constructor of small diesel locomotives, BR asked the firm to create their proposal for a new class to meet the criteria.

 

After some head-scratching and a great deal of frustration, in June 1966 R&H produced what was, by their standards, an ugly great monster of a thing. It was turned out it the house livery of the firm. One particularly hard-to-please inspector from British Railways remarked that it “looked like it had emerged from the deepest, darkest corner of the Underworld!”. After some testing, the engine was deemed a failure due to a dismal lack of haulage power

 - in spite of a hulking engine on the inside - and was cut up in December of that year. 
 

What do you think? Should I create more of these diabolical monsters? Or should I produce something more aesthetically pleasing? You can decide which.

 

16336DDC-9DE9-4920-98DC-8C669465CE9D.jpeg

  • Like 3
Link to post
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

Hi all! I’ve been following this thread for a while now, as I take great interest in ‘what-if’ and imaginary locomotives. I decided to have a go at editing one for myself - this is my first attempt at such a thing, so apologies if some editing skills are sub-standard in comparison to some of the great things I have seen here so far.

 

This uses some imagination to create a scenario in which around 1965, British Railways is in need of a new yard shunter class (heaven knows why, they already have about 12 classes of such a thing!). Having seen the work of Ruston and Hornsby, a prolific constructor of small diesel locomotives, BR asked the firm to create their proposal for a new class to meet the criteria.

 

After some head-scratching and a great deal of frustration, in June 1966 R&H produced what was, by their standards, an ugly great monster of a thing. It was turned out it the house livery of the firm. One particularly hard-to-please inspector from British Railways remarked that it “looked like it had emerged from the deepest, darkest corner of the Underworld!”. After some testing, the engine was deemed a failure due to a dismal lack of haulage power

 - in spite of a hulking engine on the inside - and was cut up in December of that year. 
 

What do you think? Should I create more of these diabolical monsters? Or should I produce something more aesthetically pleasing? You can decide which.

 

16336DDC-9DE9-4920-98DC-8C669465CE9D.jpeg

...I think it's cute though...

  • Agree 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Gold

I think I’d say that UK steam had been developed to it’s maximum potential by the grouping, by which time practice was variable, from on one hand railways like the Cambrian or Furness who were perpetuating Victorian practice with pointless but predictable inside cylinder 4-4-0s and 0-6-0s and on the other the North Eastern with advanced compound designs and  the dawn of Gresley’s big engines on the GN.  Improvements and refinements followed, but we never needed anything basically different to what we already had. 
 

In the US, and Canada, more power was still needed and bigger Chapelon French locos took the technology as far as it could reasonably go.  Had we not had the benefit of cheap Arab oil (until the Arabs realsed we were ripping them off, by which it was too late), we might have needed fast heavy freight steam locos by the mid 60s for the block trains, and Freightliners hauled by 4-8-4s with 6’ driving wheels, DoG on steroids, might have been seen, but by and large in the event supercharged type 4 diesels coped, their inefficiency not called into question until the 1974 oil crisis from the Arab-Israeli war and the blocking of the Suez Canal

  • Like 2
Link to post
Share on other sites

Here’s a far more subtle (and more  likely) modification to an existing locomotive type, the Rolls-Royce Sentinel. This example gained an almost identical livery to that of a standard Sentinel from the Barrington Light Railway. The cab was moved to a more central location to provide greater visibility to the driver, but instead of the standard singular engine, two smaller variants were fitted. I like to think of it as a smaller and more successful version of the Class 17 ‘Claytons’. Any ideas/suggestions for what I should do next?

 

SRF.

C84F41B5-0591-48F3-9B58-8181E0CAC92F.png

  • Like 3
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium
1 hour ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

Here’s a far more subtle (and more  likely) modification to an existing locomotive type, the Rolls-Royce Sentinel. This example gained an almost identical livery to that of a standard Sentinel from the Barrington Light Railway. The cab was moved to a more central location to provide greater visibility to the driver, but instead of the standard singular engine, two smaller variants were fitted. I like to think of it as a smaller and more successful version of the Class 17 ‘Claytons’. Any ideas/suggestions for what I should do next?

 

SRF.

C84F41B5-0591-48F3-9B58-8181E0CAC92F.png

Sentinels actually built a centre cab 0-8-0 which was basically two 0-4-0's sharing a single cab. It wasn't very successful as it didn't like some of the curves found on industrial railways.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

Sentinels actually built a centre cab 0-8-0 which was basically two 0-4-0's sharing a single cab. It wasn't very successful as it didn't like some of the curves found on industrial railways.

Now that you mention it, I remember an example of such a thing that used to run on the Longmoor Military Railway, No. 890 ‘General Lord Robinson’. Now it is preserved at the Avon Valley Railway, where it has been since 1986. 

  • Like 2
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium

Two engines and transmissions on four wheels would be pushing the axle load a bit! (and I'm not sure where the fuel would go either). There were a lot more 0-8-0s than that, apart from the one-off MoD loco they were built for Ebbw Vale and Normanby Park (Scunthorpe) steelworks and Moor Green colliery. The Normanby Park locos were a longer wheelbase and eventually had the centre sections of the coupling rods removed to run as 0-4-4-0s but the others remained 0-8-0.

  • Informative/Useful 3
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium
37 minutes ago, Michael Edge said:

Two engines and transmissions on four wheels would be pushing the axle load a bit! (and I'm not sure where the fuel would go either). There were a lot more 0-8-0s than that, apart from the one-off MoD loco they were built for Ebbw Vale and Normanby Park (Scunthorpe) steelworks and Moor Green colliery. The Normanby Park locos were a longer wheelbase and eventually had the centre sections of the coupling rods removed to run as 0-4-4-0s but the others remained 0-8-0.

Transmission was just to the two inner axles, the coupling rods doing the rest. Axle weight would be less, (only one cab). 

Link to post
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Michael Edge said:

Two engines and transmissions on four wheels would be pushing the axle load a bit! (and I'm not sure where the fuel would go either). There were a lot more 0-8-0s than that, apart from the one-off MoD loco they were built for Ebbw Vale and Normanby Park (Scunthorpe) steelworks and Moor Green colliery. The Normanby Park locos were a longer wheelbase and eventually had the centre sections of the coupling rods removed to run as 0-4-4-0s but the others remained 0-8-0.

Thanks for the advice Michael, I was wondering whether two axles would be sufficient! I agree that the axle-load would be pushing it, especially for an industrial railway. In light of this, I’ll post a revised version in due course.

  • Like 1
Link to post
Share on other sites

  • RMweb Premium
44 minutes ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

Thanks for the advice Michael, I was wondering whether two axles would be sufficient! I agree that the axle-load would be pushing it, especially for an industrial railway. In light of this, I’ll post a revised version in due course.

TH built some twin engined 0-6-0s later, these were based on the 0-6-0 Sentinel layout, weighing about 60T or so.

  • Like 2
Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...