Imaginary Locomotives

[Zomboid]

8 hours ago, DenysW said:

a 2-8-2 mogul

Much as I don't want to be "that guy", 2-8-2s were known as Mikados. Moguls are 2-6-0s.

[DenysW]

I'm quoting starting tractive effort because that's what I'm sure of in the Gresley design that was actually built. I suspect the truth mixes in some politics (my newest express loco is more powerful than yours, LMS), with big starting tractive effort to make sure the train can both start and accelerate up the ruling gradient, and then have sustained power at high speed. Two of these I can't put the actual specification numbers to, hence my emphasis on starting TE. As all of the express locos cited above were in the 35-45,000 lbf  starting tractive effort range, with no grate bigger than 50 ft-sq, I also believe that all of the designers were under (probably financial) orders not to go for mechanical stoking - as that requires a different size of coal, so would trigger disproportionate spend, inconvenience etc. As also potentially the need for new turning circles if Gresley had gone the traditional-layout Garratt.

 

Apologies for slip-shod use of jargon re mikados and moguls.

[The Johnster]

There was an example of a fast express Beyer-Garratt, built under licence in France for service in Algeria, and streamlined.  It was a 4-6-2+2-6-4 'double pacific' and, I believe, very successful; the need was to haul heavy trains at speed over long single track sections to maximise pathing opportunities. 

[rodent279]

49 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

There was an example of a fast express Beyer-Garratt, built under licence in France for service in Algeria, and streamlined.  It was a 4-6-2+2-6-4 'double pacific' and, I believe, very successful; the need was to haul heavy trains at speed over long single track sections to maximise pathing opportunities. 

Yup. Compounds, with Cossart valve gear, quite handsome looking machines. Tuplin covers them in "Compound Locomotives."

[cypherman]

Hi all,

Although I made this a few weeks ago and posted it else where. I had not thought of posting it in this thread till now. Even though it is an imaginary loco.

Edited May 16, 2021 by cypherman

[Cunningham Loco & Machine Works]

Here is the hypothetical EMD type 4, or one-half of the two unit set anyhow.

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

EMD?  How very dare you!  You've given it an Alco windscreen and an EE nose! 

 

EMD bulldog is much more aesthetically pleasing.

[BernardTPM]

5 minutes ago, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

EMD?  How very dare you!  You've given it an Alco windscreen and an EE nose! 

EMD bulldog is much more aesthetically pleasing.

Definitely EMD.

Edited May 17, 2021 by BernardTPM

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

arghh... my eyes!

 

I've never seen one of those before! 

 

 

[AlfaZagato]

I like it.

[tythatguy1312]

I've been kicking this idea around in my head for a while now but has anyone thought of a GWR King's boiler, firebox & Cylinders on the wheels and frames of The Great Bear? Seems like a good way to solve the King's high axle loading to me.

[Coach bogie]

11 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

I've been kicking this idea around in my head for a while now but has anyone thought of a GWR King's boiler, firebox & Cylinders on the wheels and frames of The Great Bear? Seems like a good way to solve the King's high axle loading to me.

In my one day/never list is a rebuilt Bear as a pacific. Plans were drawn up to rebuild with a replacement , I assume, lighter boiler with the running plate at the cab end staying at splasher level to the cab with a new rear bogie arrangement.

 

This is to go with my 'super star' - a late series Star with a 47xx boiler, that was not progressed with as it was too tall. As an alternative Swindon designed the castle instead.

 

Mike Wiltshire

[Flying Pig]

21 minutes ago, Coach bogie said:

In my one day/never list is a rebuilt Bear as a pacific. Plans were drawn up to rebuild with a replacement , I assume, lighter boiler with the running plate at the cab end staying at splasher level to the cab with a new rear bogie arrangement.

 

That's a much more believable background for the GWR-ised Princess people like to offer as a Hawksworth pacific.  Assuming it was rebuilt at the time the real loco was, it would no doubt resemble an enlarged Castle.

[Zomboid]

I'd like to see it rebuilt as a 4-4-4 like the Canadian Pacific Jubilee locos. Probably not hugely useful for heavy trains on hilly routes, but they were fast and something similar could have got between London and Bristol pretty rapidly.

[The Johnster]

On 09/04/2021 at 18:38, rodent279 said:

 

They're not exactly easy on the eye, in the same way as CoT, Castles and others,

 

Castles not easy on the eye?  Wash your soap out with mouth and water and go to your room young man, and don't come out until you've had a good long hard think about what you've just said.  The bent elbow steam pipes are perfectly proportioned on Castles and accentuate the thrusting dynamic look of a smokebox with the chimney mounted towards the rear, one of the sexiest locomotives ever produced.

 

On 10/04/2021 at 11:41, lazythread said:

Don't know if you'd get a Sulzer engine in a Hymek, they're too short. I believe the Maybach MD870 engine can go up to 2000HP, so remove the boiler and add an eth generator or an auxiliary engine. 

 

Now a Maybach MD870 will fit a Baby Deltic. Type 3/4 power with eth and air brakes.......

 

The Hymeks were withdrawn before the Westerns because there was no room in the structure to accommodate eth or train air brake gear, which meant that by the mid 70s there was little work for them.  Even retaining the Maybach would not have saved them as, in addition to the eth and air brake equipment you would have to find room for a generator to supply current to the traction motors, and the space released by the removal of the hydraulic pump, torque converter, and the physical gearing is not in an area of the locomotive conducive to siting this generator.  Also, there would be the weight to consider, as the generator is heavier than the hydraulic pump and gears it replaces, and there are only 4 axles to distribute it across.

 

The Hymeks weight 75 tons, a coach lighter than the similarly powered 37s, and were pocket rockets, as were the 33s, also 75 tonners and only 150hp less powerful.  The 33s have proved over time that the electric transmission and eth dual braked approach was the better long term approach, and they are probably the better choice as a low powered general purpose locomotive, though the 37 was the one built in higher numbers.

 

The 33 scores on length as well, 1 foot or so shorter than the 'mek at 50', a masterclass in squeezing the electric transmission, dual brakes, and eth into a small frame and an illustration of forward thinking in 1961, while the 'meks were built with the steam heating that doomed them on their own region in little over a decade.  I'm told they bounced around a bit at speed, though, while the 'meks rode like Pullmans; this is a function of the bogie wheelbase I am sure, and there are no diesel electric Bo-Bos with long enough wheelbases to compare them with, or 25kv electrics for that matter either.  I assume the reason for this was to save weight and keep axle loads in check; the 31s are the nearest thing to comparable, same weight as a Western but half the power, but they rode beautifully.  Westerns, and Warships, with short wheelbase bogies, could be a bit lively at speed, and the Westers vibrated horribly at between 55 and 65mph, the very speed range needed for a lot of class 6 freight work in the early 70s.

 

A Co-Co 33 is basically a 47, isn't it?  I do like the BRCW styling, though, especially in green syp!

[The Johnster]

The CP Jubilee was a bit of a one off but very successful in it's role, and I see what you mean about the Paddington-Bristol route for it.  I suspect the Bear would have been a bit long for that sort of thing, but how about a 4-4-4 version of a Star, with the driving wheels pushed to the maximum diameter allowed by clearing the bottom of the boiler, and a good, deep, wide, but short, firebox (not particularly a Churchward feature, but it would be possible to fit one in behind the driving wheels with this proposal), perhaps 7' or more.  I reckon such a loco would have been easily capable of over 100mph with 10 on, and could have resulted in a significant timetable improvement for the 'Bristolian'.  It should have been easy enough to fire, and the no.1 boiler was a proven performer.  It would have had to have been pitched at the highest possible level to accommodate the large driving wheels, so the centre of gravity would not have been low, andthe leading and trailing trucks would have had a major role to play in modulating the ride!

 

Axle loading should not have been a problem, and the loco would have been able to go anywhere a Star could, but the Bristol Road is the obvious racing stretch that the advantagese of the larger driving wheels could be exploited on, along perhaps with the B & E on the Somerset Levels and the Exe Valley.  Oxford/Worcester might have provided useful work for them as well, but other routes strike me as being a bit hilly and heavily loaded for them.  A class of 20 or so would probably have been sufficient.  I'd envisage them rebuilt by Collett with his tip up seated cabs and 4k gallon tenders, and the short chimney made necessary by the high pitched boiler might have needed some sort of smoke lifting arrangement, which would have been a GW first and probably last.  I'm envisaging a sort of cowl with rectangular brass rimmed hand hold holes of the sort that Swindon later made for the WR Britannias.

 

Churchward would have probably numbered them in 50xx range, meaning that the later Castles in that range would have been 80xx.  As a development of the Stars, perhaps they'd have been the Galaxy Class, or maybe the Nebulae...

 

If a further increase in power was needed, as a parallel to the enlargement of the Star to the Castle, it might have been found that Swindon had designed itself into a corner, as the fatter boiler would almost certainly have resulted in a reduction in driving wheel diameter and thus speed; at this point the loco becomes a bit pointless.  The King, which had to reduce the Castle's driving wheel diameter by 2 inches to clear the fatter boiler, was an example of this but in this case the increase in T.E. on the hillier West of England route was worth the slight loss in top speed.

Edited June 2, 2021 by The Johnster

[Zomboid]

32 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

.  I reckon such a loco would have been easily capable of over 100mph

The CP Jubilee holds the Canadian speed record for steam at 117mph, which isn't that far short of Mallard. They haven't chased speed in the same way as the Europeans have, but it wasn't beaten by anything in Canada until the 1970s.

 

So that principle on the flat bit of the GWML would allow some good timings to be made.

[tythatguy1312]

45 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

The CP Jubilee holds the Canadian speed record for steam at 117mph, which isn't that far short of Mallard. They haven't chased speed in the same way as the Europeans have, but it wasn't beaten by anything in Canada until the 1970s.

 

So that principle on the flat bit of the GWML would allow some good timings to be made.

I must admit what I had in mind was a method to allow the Kings to traverse the whole London-Penzance Mainline, rather than simply gunning it between London & Bristol. I also personally believe a 4-4-4 would have far insufficient adhesion for the heavy trains of the GWR, thus making a 4-6-2 or a 4-6-0 preferable for the work at hand.

[The Johnster]

To Penzance, it might be worth considering adding Pembroke Dock, Neyland, Milford Haven, and Birkenhead, all of which were accessible by Castles.  In fact, there was very little that a King, or for that matter a 47xx, could do that a Castle couldn’t come pretty close to doing, and the reasons that GW was so fixated on 4-6-0s.  There are steep parts in Cornwall, on the SWML west of Cardiff, and on the Birkenhead road north of Shrewsbury, all good reasons for promoting the sure-footed 4-6-0s.  The Britannias did well enough on the SWML, but they were a lot more mixed traffic in concept with smaller driving wheels.  Canton used it’s high mileage Brits on downline work where the worn, almost 6’ diameter, drivers had tractive effort advantages to play to.  
 

One has to ask what the Kings, and for that matter the 47xx, were for, as their route availability issues gave them a very insignificant advantage over the Castles.  They come across as a vanity project.  They were badly needed on the heavy South Wales trains but were not permitted until too late in the day to have any impact.  They could take 16 bogies unassisted from Severn Tunnel bottom to Badminton, 2 more than a Castle or Brit, and could have made a big difference, but they were too heavy. 

[AlfaZagato]

4700's predated the Castle by four years.   Wikipedia has it that operations asked for (basically) the Grange class.   Churchward gave them the Night Owls instead.   Maybe he was chasing tractive effort over speed, which the 4700s better the Granges in.

 

Kings were a pure publicity stunt, chasing title 'Most Powerful in England' back from the Lord Nelson.

[Zomboid]

Wasn't the LN's claim to that crown also a pretty meaningless publicity stunt? All the companies indulged in that kind of thing in their own way of course, but since they built bespoke traction for specific duties on routes with individual characteristics any broad brush comparison like that would be pretty worthless.

[The Johnster]

There was no doubt much meat for the publicity departments of the GW and the Southern in the 'most powerful 4-6-0 in the UK' title, and the GW had had recent success after the 1924 Wembley inspired Castle/A1 exchanges, but while railway journalists and enthusiasts love this sort of thing, it is pretty meaningless to anyone else.  What matters is that a locomotive can haul the requisite loads to the timings in the WTT, reliably. within the confines of the loading gauge, and the route availability of the routes they are intended to operate over, and do so with sufficient fuel economy and with enough mechanical reliability to do so profitably.  At the risk of disturbing the accepted wisdom of Swindonophiles, I'd say that the Kings were not a success as the class largely failed to meet the route availability demands of the routes it was originally intended to work on, and thus only 30 were built (all right, 31 with an extra as a replacement for a destroyed loco).

 

This is a disappointing total for a class that might have been the next step from the Castles,, and the Kings proved to be up to the jobs where they were allowed to be used, but I have already pointed out that they never made much impact on the busy and profitable South Wales route where the extra power would have enabled piloting to be done away with between Severn Tunnel Bottom and Badminton, with a considerable saving of both time and costs.

 

In the event the GW and WR had to be content with upgrading from Stars to Castles, and by the time the last Castles were built in 1950 they were looking like a pretty outdated concept.  The Kings having proved a bit of a dead end, there was no significant development of express passenger motive power after the Castles.  There was an attempt of course, in the form of the Hawksworth Counties, which was an excellent locomotive for heavy work on hilly routes but not to the extent that the production of Castles was stopped, indeed it continued after the last County had been built. 

 

There are many factors in the stagnation of development at Swindon after the end of WW1 and the grouping, but it is my view that the failure of the Kings to make the impact needed was not the least important of them.  From around 1930 to the end of steam on the WR, the general view seemed to be that trying to build a loco better than a Castle was pointless, though improvements in draughting and superheating upgraded the Castles over time.  By the late 1940s, the other 3 big 4 railways had all produced locos much better than Castles, either in terms of haulage, speed, steam raising, ease of preparation, route availability, and in terms of maintenance regimes, and in some cases several of those listed attributes.  The Stars, Churchward's glory engines, were old hat by then. 

 

Churchward's real legacy was in the bread and butter locos, the 43xx, small and large prairies, 28xx, and the Halls, Granges, and Manors derived from them later.  The other big 4 produced locos that were their equal, but few that were significantly better.  It is illuminating to compare BR (basically LMS) power classifications; the LMS 2-6-4 tank family were all 4MT, as were the large and small GW prairies (the GW small prairie is about the same size as an Ivatt 2MT, but it is 4MT), and neither the Stanier nor the Thompson 2-8-0 heavy freight locos were a great advance on the 28xx.  No other railway replicated anything like the 42xx, 5205, and 72xx series; one might have thought that something of the sort would have been useful in the Northeast of England but tender locos were used instead. 

 

Urie was ahead of the game with his mixed traffic 4-6-0s, 20 years ahead of the Granges.

[Flying Pig]

35 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

...the GW small prairie is about the same size as an Ivatt 2MT, but it is 4MT...

 

Difficult to see why, assuming (big assumption) that the figures in WikiP are correct:

 

GWR 4575

Ivatt 2MT tank

 

The TE of the Prairie is a bit higher due to slightly smaller drivers and an inch more on cylinder diameter, but the overall weight and boiler dimensions are practically identical. As for the LMS 2-6-4T, the firegrate is 60% bigger than a 4575 and the total heating surface about 25% more.  Since the LMS 2-6-4Ts (unlike the 3P 2-6-2Ts) were not notably shy steamers I find it hard to believe that the two types were actually equivalent on the road.  Would a Small Prairie have been able to exceed 80mph on the Euston suburbans?

[rockershovel]

Surely the real point here, is that by the 1930s, steam traction had reached the limits of its useful development in the U.K.? The real last-generation giants, the huge simple-expansion Garratts and Mallet-type articulated locos and fast, super-heavy 2-8-4 and 4-8-4 types with feedwater heating, superheating, mechanical stoking and cast-steel beds to tie all that power together, found no home here. 

 

Last-generation UK steam essentially consisted of heavy, simple-expansion suburban 2-6-4T types, mixed-traffic 4-6-0 and the 9F 2-10-0,  well suited to U.K. conditions but all, essentially pre-war designs. 

[DavidB-AU]

34 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

Surely the real point here, is that by the 1930s, steam traction had reached the limits of its useful development in the U.K.?

 

The UK was designing and building more advanced steam locos for other countries well into the 1950s. Come to think of it, the UK was exporting more advanced locos in the 1920s than it was building for domestic use in the 1950s!

 

Cheers

David

Edited June 3, 2021 by DavidB-AU