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Imaginary Locomotives


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2 hours ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

I looked at my extremely squished Terrier from a few days ago, and decided ‘if I squish it even more, it can have a tender’. So there’s the result, a probably useless loco that’s not much different from a Terrier minus being built for long-distance. Of course, Rule 1 always applies!

I could find work for it on any light railway that featured sharp curves and, assuming some water is carried in the tender, longish runs between water columns. If the tender is used entirely for coal it is probably overprovision, unless the loco had to work very hard for long periods.

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This thread seems to be demonstrating the point that anything remotely feasible has already been drawn out in detail by someone, somewhere and the reasons it doesn't work, are well known; and anything at least half-way feasible, has been built, often with a similar result. 

Edited by rockershovel
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Personally I find constraints and parameters make things like this a bit more fun and challenging (much as I like drawing Ivatt/Stanier 4-6-4s and 2-8-4s etc.).

 

The UK loading gauge is a good constraint as it limits pretty much every dimension, but it's good to think about the purpose of such an imaginary loco, and dig down into why some designs were thought of.

 

I would say the cuts and shuts thread is probably better for the freeform photoshoppery type of thing.

 

 

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13 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

alright so since we are seemingly almost completely out of ideas, 

Ideas will come. But an exercise might be to imagine a traffic that one's favourite railway did not have, but maybe could have had, and see if one can imagine a locomotive for it. Eliminating double heading is always a favourite, although given the UK loading gauge its hard to avoid the Garratt option. High frequency, fast acceleration suburban traffic is another. SR enthusiasts are a bit thin on the ground, but imagine heavy fast container traffic from Southampton Docks. What would Bulleid have built? Or supposing Bulleid hadn't been appointed? If there had been more continuity from Maunsell what express locomotives might there have been? And what might have replaced all those Victoria tank engines? Or supposing the SR electrification had all been short range, but clean air acts came in sooner? Can you imagine mixed mode steam/electric? 

 

I'm having a bit more trouble imagining options for my own favourite to the west. The railcars provide all too easy a model for suburban electrification for example. 

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What I'd like to see is people taking one engineer's design and reimagining it to be by someone else. For example, what if Bulleid had been installed as CME after Gresley died instead of Thompson- how would he have gone about standardising and rebuilding the LNER's fleet?

 

"Oh but Bulleid was the SOUTHERN railway's CME you big idiot, not the LNER's!" Yeah, well, so what? This is for funsies, we're having fun here. Fun is mandatory.

 

Imagine it- Bullied's A1/1 class. He'd likely be seen as the villain many see Thompson as today.

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I somewhat doubt this thread will ever run out of ideas, even after a decade or so of existence, so I have a new suggestion to start off another thinking spree.

Let's imagine that WWII didn't end in 1945, but instead in 1953, escalating after Operation Barbarossa did in fact succeed, and the conflict became a stalemate of Axis-controlled land against the Allies - who now amounted to almost every capable country in the world. What motive power would the Allied powers have come up with to take the ever-increasing loads of wartime conflict that S160s and WD 2-8-0s were no longer sufficient for?

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3 minutes ago, JayWizzleHizzle said:

What I'd like to see is people taking one engineer's design and reimagining it to be by someone else. For example, what if Bulleid had been installed as CME after Gresley died instead of Thompson- how would he have gone about standardising and rebuilding the LNER's fleet?

 

"Oh but Bulleid was the SOUTHERN railway's CME you big idiot, not the LNER's!" Yeah, well, so what? This is for funsies, we're having fun here. Fun is mandatory.

 

Imagine it- Bullied's A1/1 class. He'd likely be seen as the villain many see Thompson as today.

Rule 1 always comes first - and what if Stanier went Southern?

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10 minutes ago, JayWizzleHizzle said:

Still rather new here- what's rule 1? Fun comes first or something like that?

Its your layout so you can run what you like. The complete opposite is 'rivet counter'.

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2 hours ago, JimC said:

Or supposing Bulleid hadn't been appointed? If there had been more continuity from Maunsell what express locomotives might there have been? And what might have replaced all those Victoria tank engines? Or supposing the SR electrification had all been short range, but clean air acts came in sooner? Can you imagine mixed mode steam/electric? 

 

I'm having a bit more trouble imagining options for my own favourite to the west. The railcars provide all too easy a model for suburban electrification for example. 

Has anyone dreamt up a Pacific version of a Lord Nelson yet?

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Rule 1 states 'It's my train set and I'll run what I like'.  It is in fact a complex relationship between your desire to be accurate, your desire to include things not strictly accurate, and your ability to suspend disbelief, a very personal and individual thing.  In my case, I model a semi-imaginary location in South Wales in the 1948-58 period, with locos and coaches from Tondu depot.  I want to run a BR 3MT tank, one of my favourites, but not appropriate, so I've constructed a Rule 1 through working for a Barry loco, which will also allow a Taff A when I finish the kit I've been building for 30 years. 

 

The 10 year period inevitably leads to anomalous combinations of locos and stock in different liveries; for example, a Hornby 2721 scrapped in 1950 should not appear on the layout at the same time as a Baccy 94xx not allocated to Tondu until 1954, or haul auto trailers that were not allox TDU until 1953.  But it's my train set etc.  I try to avoid anomalies in the same train, but don't lose sleep over it.

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21 hours ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

I somewhat doubt this thread will ever run out of ideas, even after a decade or so of existence, so I have a new suggestion to start off another thinking spree.

Let's imagine that WWII didn't end in 1945, but instead in 1953, escalating after Operation Barbarossa did in fact succeed, and the conflict became a stalemate of Axis-controlled land against the Allies - who now amounted to almost every capable country in the world. What motive power would the Allied powers have come up with to take the ever-increasing loads of wartime conflict that S160s and WD 2-8-0s were no longer sufficient for?

Isn't this pretty much the underlying scenario in Orwell's 1984? His picture of London (basically London of 1940s) suggests that the transport network would have resembled the early years of BR...

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4 hours ago, rockershovel said:

Isn't this pretty much the underlying scenario in Orwell's 1984? His picture of London (basically London of 1940s) suggests that the transport network would have resembled the early years of BR...

 

And done quite well in the brief snippet of the railway seen in the film from the 1980's; a concrete nightmare of a station with a knackered overall roof (actually shot inside the goods loading bay of an old factory in Battersea I think, from such an angle that you can't see the lack of rails).  In the following scene, the train was hauled by a USA tank loco in rather weary condition, so a faintly brutal, industrial design of loco (just different-enough from 'traditional' British locomotives to stand out, and look a bit sci-fi in context), all work-stained and faintly knackered-looking.  A nice touch was the shabby Pullman carriage with broken windows and peeling paint, exemplifying the way the Ingsoc government had effectively toppled the traditional class system and made a big play of how the revolution had deposed the aristocrats; their luxury carriage repurposed, in poor condition, as effectively a cattle-truck for the proles in the film.  It's only a brief scene, but a nice detail.  Shot on the Kent and East Sussex I think.

 

It's one of those 'what if' type scenarios that borders on the sci-fi, but the mythical Strategic Steam Reserve... Duncan Campbells 1980's book "War Plan UK" about the UK's preparedness (or otherwise) for the aftermath of World War Three dismisses the notion of the Strategic Steam Reserve, but does mention command trains existing in mothballs by BR at strategic locations, and requisitioned steam locomotives from preserved lines to operate if an EMP knocks-out the diesel-electrics.  Though even he, and a report he comments on in the book, mention that the lack of infrastructure to support steam locomotives even into the 1980's would hamper their effective use, so it was probably more of a pipe-dream by some Whitehall/BR planner.

 

I suppose the nearest to reality (trying to drag this thread back on track!) was the MoD's '"War Specification" Austerity tank locomotive, trialled on the Longmoor Military Railway.  Basically a standard tank loco but oil-fired, with electric headlamps and generators, Westinghouse brake pumps, and all sorts of other fancy mechanical gubbins to make the locomotives more usable in a Cold War Gone Hot type scenario, back at the point where WW3 seemed a survivable/winnable possibility, before Mutually Assured Destruction became policy.  I think some modification was done to a Austerity 2-8-0 too before the project was shelved, and most of the mods were stripped from the tank loco, but some evidence of them can still be seen on the preserved, surviving loco, "Brussels", in the museum at the KWVR.  Ironically enough, what seems to have killed the project was the lack of availability of fuel oil during the Suez crisis, rather reinforcing the fact that on UK soil at least a coal-fired military locomotive would have been more useful at the time, but I suppose to MoD planners it made some sense to have a loco that ran on oil, given the national railway network were abandoning coal-firing.

 

Various modifications were carried out of course in reality to industrial Austerity tanks to keep them working efficiently at collieries into the 1980's, so as a what-if scenario (say, the UK struggling to import enough oil for a long-term period) would any of these mods have been made to BR Standards and the like fleet-wide to keep them running into the 80's, until coal-fired electrification filled the gaps?

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If one looks at how the USATC and ROD operated in Europe during the wars, a no-fuel-oil, no-electricity situation could make use of an SSR even without infrastructure, providing collieries were still available.
In a crisis, one might imagine large coal dumps being organised at required locations, and deployment of water 'gins' as used in Australia and elsewhere to support long distance running. Perhaps even steam powered water pumps to plug into mains supplies, reservoirs or rivers in lieu of water cranes etc.

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