Imaginary Locomotives

[Flying Pig]

35 minutes ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

Imagining that the British Transport Police actually had its own fleet for branch lines - trespassers have been awfully quiet since they brought these in…

 

Pretty close, but actually, they tend to use less obvious transport:

 

 

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, PenrithBeacon said:

It was also true that the Midland Compound, nominally a smaller engine, was better than either of them.

 

But not for WCML work, for which the LMS Standard Compounds were not intended. In the period 1927-33 the LMS satisfactorily solved its small-to-medium-sized engine problem (many pre-grouping 4-4-0s past their prime - Caledonian, GSWR, Highland, LNWR) with the Compounds and 2Ps. 

[DenysW]

I look at the 5 main French companies, and the Bavarians, all of whom were moving to Pacifics before WW1. Indeed North British built a batch of 40 Pacifics in 1916 for the French Etat because their preferred supplier in Lille had become on the wrong side of the trenches in 1914 with only the first loco delivered.

 

If you have a more powerful locomotive design you can use it for strength or speed (or a bit of both).  GCR could have used a better reason to go from the North to London via their line. The Midland could have used them to make the Settle-Carlisle route look less of a waste of shareholder's money for passenger duty. GN and/or LNWR could have shaved time off London-Scotland in response to GWR's claim to have the most powerful locomotive on UK rails (the Bear). None of them chose to, but that doesn't stop the imagination!

 

 

[PenrithBeacon]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

But not for WCML work, for which the LMS Standard Compounds were not intended. In the period 1927-33 the LMS satisfactorily solved its small-to-medium-sized engine problem (many pre-grouping 4-4-0s past their prime - Caledonian, GSWR, Highland, LNWR) with the Compounds and 2Ps. 

Sorry Steven, but the LMS standard compounds were used on the WCML

[Compound2632]

7 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

Sorry Steven, but the LMS standard compounds were used on the WCML

 

Yes, but not, as far as I'm aware, on the principal Anglo-Scottish expresses. However, I'm happy to be corrected. I know that they replaced the 'George the Fifth' 4-4-0s on the Euston-Birmingham-Wolverhampton expresses, which was, for various reasons, a cause of resentment among some LNWR drivers; I can imagine that they may well have been used on other of the lighter expresses elsewhere on the WCML.

 

My point is that it was never intended that they should be the solution to the problem of working the heavier WCML expresses that the Claughtons had not really solved, and neither did the Hughes 4-6-0s. 

[Gibbo675]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Yes, but not, as far as I'm aware, on the principal Anglo-Scottish expresses. However, I'm happy to be corrected. I know that they replaced the 'George the Fifth' 4-4-0s on the Euston-Birmingham-Wolverhampton expresses, which was, for various reasons, a cause of resentment among some LNWR drivers; I can imagine that they may well have been used on other of the lighter expresses elsewhere on the WCML.

 

My point is that it was never intended that they should be the solution to the problem of working the heavier WCML expresses that the Claughtons had not really solved, and neither did the Hughes 4-6-0s. 

Hi Stephen,

 

I would concur, and having read Locomotive Panorama many years ago here are some diagrams of fairly large engines:

 

 

 

4-6-2 and 2-8-2 from 1928.

 

Gibbo.

[Compound2632]

12 hours ago, Gibbo675 said:

I would concur, and having read Locomotive Panorama many years ago here are some diagrams of fairly large engines:

 

I was rather pleased with the analogy I thought of late yesterday evening, so I'll post it anyway:

 

We planned Sunday dinner. There were two problems:

1. What to have for the main course;
2. What to have for desert.

The joint of beef I'd bought turned out to be a bit on the small side for a family of four, including two young adults, so had not adequately solved problem (1). The cheesecake we made was a superb solution to problem (2) but it was never intended as a main course.

 

On the early LMS, the main course was the WCML expresses; desert was the need for modern intermediate express power, the two young adults were the increasing weight of the Anglo-Scottish expresses in the post-Great War years, the joint of beef was the Claughton and Hughes 4-6-0 and the cheescake was of course the Compound.

[DenysW]

No doubt I'll be corrected with facts on this but my present view is:

 

- By 1906 the French, Bavarians, and Americans all had experience with big-grate (> 40 ft2) boilers put on locomotives. Not always successfully in combination, but experience. Not sure about the Prussians, who appear to have been recovering from a system that had developed as a mess of unconnected branchlines.

- The Brits didn't. Very little over 20 ft2, and an industry that liked making progress in small increments

- When pacifics became madly fashionable from 1905-ish onwards, the rest of the world had the grates+boilers to make use of the opportunities of the new wider grates the design allows for

- Churchward tried to address with the Great Bear and its boiler-development aspects, but the rest were too conservative to try, then got locked into inertia by WW1

- Post WW1 Gresley was the first to go large with a 40 ft2 grate+boiler in 1922, and use the pacific design to closer to its full as the A1

- Result: UK 15-20 years behind the rest of the world

[rodent279]

Not imaginary, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler's_Ghost

 

But imagine if 150+ years of technical innovation & progress could work this up into a viable design.

[33C]

Now, a little something for the South Devon Banks.........

[The Johnster]

1 hour ago, DenysW said:

No doubt I'll be corrected with facts on this but my present view is:

 

- By 1906 the French, Bavarians, and Americans all had experience with big-grate (> 40 ft2) boilers put on locomotives. Not always successfully in combination, but experience. Not sure about the Prussians, who appear to have been recovering from a system that had developed as a mess of unconnected branchlines.

- The Brits didn't. Very little over 20 ft2, and an industry that liked making progress in small increments

- When pacifics became madly fashionable from 1905-ish onwards, the rest of the world had the grates+boilers to make use of the opportunities of the new wider grates the design allows for

- Churchward tried to address with the Great Bear and its boiler-development aspects, but the rest were too conservative to try, then got locked into inertia by WW1

- Post WW1 Gresley was the first to go large with a 40 ft2 grate+boiler in 1922, and use the pacific design to closer to its full as the A1

- Result: UK 15-20 years behind the rest of the world

 

This is a pretty fair summary of events  and raises some very good points.  The railway press of the day was full of pacifics, on European and the North American railways.  The American line of development eventually resulted in medium pacifics for short line and suburban work, while the top link jobs were done by 4-6-4s, 4-8-2s, and 4-8-4s.  On mainland Europe, the ultimates were 4-6-4s and 4-8-2s.  There was a good deal of excitement when Churchward, who was a leading light at that time, brought out The Great Bear, to the extent that it was almost guaranteed to fail to meet the hype, which it duly did.  It illustrated some of the problems imposed on pacifics by the British loading gauge, and was on a railway which suited 4-6-0s that were capable of timing the loads.  There had been a good bit of hype about Atlantics a few years earlier, and it was these that proved the worth of wide fireboxes in the UK; there was no successful pacific or much prospect of one before the Great War, as the European and American examples were not suitable for scaling down to our loading gauge without compromising performance. 

 

The Great Bear was an odd development of the de Glehn 4 cylinder divided driver layout and it is difficult to make a definitive comment on whether it was a development of the Star 4-6-0 or the atlantic version, perhaps both.  It seems not to have been particularly influenced by European pacifics, though the Bavarians had a similar inside framed rear pony.  It can be regareded as a dead end in terms of British practice.

 

In 1914 the Pennsylvania RR brought out their very successful K4 pacific, a class that remained in production for a good while and remained in front line service on all but the heaviest trains until the end of steam on that railroad.  It is often quoted as the main influence on Gresley's A1, which was a response to the post war increase in loads and a desire for faster timings and longer non stop runs.  The design was originally brought out by the GNR, and Raven's NER pacific for that railway, but close enough to the grouping to have been built with through ECML working in mind.  I am unsure of the Gresley A1's relationship to the K4; certainly the proportions are similar, but I would consider that the Gresley's 3rd cylinder is enough to make his loco a completely new idea, and ultimately a very successful one.  The other railways were slow to respond, and Churchward apparently commented that 'what did that young man want to design a pacific for; we could have sold him one'.  The Great Bear was rebuilt as a Castle not long after Collett took over.  It took the LMS over a decade to join the pacific club, the interim thinking being apparently that a 3 cylindered 4-6-0 about the same size as a Castle would suffice. 

 

The GW was pretty backward looking by this time, suffering from an advanced case of the small c conservatism and intense pressure to succeed that hobbled British CMEs for more than a century, allied to a 'British is best by definition because it's British, dammit all Carruthers' sort of attitude. It continued the 4-6-0s, developing them into a loco too heavy to be of the use it should have been, the King.  The Southern inherited the Urie King Arthur, arguably the best 4-6-0 in the country at the grouping, and followed up with the Maunsell Lord Nelsons, which were, like the double chimneyed Kings and the rebuilt Royal Scots, as good as 4-6-0s got.  It took until the second war and nationalisation, with austerity and poor coal, to popularise light pacifics, and the second war effectively put an end to big pacific development for top link fast duties on the ECML and WCML.  Only Thompson's A1/1 rebuild and Peppercorn's A1 had 6'8" wheels, the Thompson A2/2, A2/3, Peppercorn A2, and Bullied Merchant Navy having more mixed traffic-appropriate 6'2" drivers, though they were used on fast express trains.

 

I would agree completely with your comment that the UK was 15-20 years behind the US and those parts of the world that imported stock from the US, and similarly behind mainland Europe, and would say that the gap extended over the decades to 30 or 40 years post grouping, when the failure to adopt air-braked longer wheelbase or bogie goods and especially mineral wagons condemned the nation to the loose coupled 60-wagon Victorian railway it stll largely had 60 years later.  More or less all the technology used on current railways with the exception of specific high speed Shinshanken or TGV type routes was available in 1923, but very little had been adopted by nationalisation.  The exception was the Southern, which was extending its 3rd rail 750vdc network, which was tbh pretty much obsoleter for all excpet inner suburban work by then; more backward thinking, and continued for another quarter century with main line schemes.  There were reasons for this backward mentality, though I am not really qualified in terms of engineering or business economics to say if they were valid reasons or not!  We are still suffering the consequences, and arguably still suffering the economic fallout of Hudson's bubble and the Overend Gurney bank collapse in our reluctance to sign off on the huge capital amounts needed to resolve the situation...

[The Johnster]

3 minutes ago, 33C said:

Now, a little something for the South Devon Banks.........

As we say in Wales, tidy!  Probably capable of taking anything over the South Devon banks at 75mph, uphill.

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, DenysW said:

- Result: UK 15-20 years behind the rest of the world

 

Operating conditions were different. By and large, British locomotives were good enough for what they were asked to do.

[Northmoor]

12 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

I would agree completely with your comment that the UK was 15-20 years behind the US and those parts of the world that imported stock from the US, and similarly behind mainland Europe, and would say that the gap extended over the decades to 30 or 40 years post grouping, when the failure to adopt air-braked longer wheelbase or bogie goods and especially mineral wagons condemned the nation to the loose coupled 60-wagon Victorian railway it stll largely had 60 years later.  More or less all the technology used on current railways with the exception of specific high speed Shinkansen or TGV type routes was available in 1923, but very little had been adopted by nationalisation.  The exception was the Southern, which was extending its 3rd rail 750vdc network, which was tbh pretty much obsolete for all excpet inner suburban work by then; more backward thinking, and continued for another quarter century with main line schemes.  There were reasons for this backward mentality, though I am not really qualified in terms of engineering or business economics to say if they were valid reasons or not!  We are still suffering the consequences, and arguably still suffering the economic fallout of Hudson's bubble and the Overend Gurney bank collapse in our reluctance to sign off on the huge capital amounts needed to resolve the situation...

A quick pedantic point - Obsolete does NOT mean "Out of Date", it means "Not available from its original manufacturer".  Since 3rd rail electrification kit is still available from suppliers, it isn't obsolete even in the 21st century.  I would argue that 3rd rail is entirely satisfactory in SE England (even on the longer routes to Kent and Dorset) as the distances between important stops are sufficiently short and many lines aren't straight enough, that higher than 90mph operation available with OHLE doesn't actually save a significant amount of time.

 

Totally agree on the failure to invest in technology but it would have required a major change in working practices, which the BR Mod Plan also failed to address sufficiently.  Imagine how much less of a cull the 1960s would have been if those investments had been made in the 1930s and 40s?  Of course at that time labour was cheap, so there wasn't the business imperative to replace it with technology.

[Compound2632]

33 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

 the failure to adopt air-braked longer wheelbase or bogie goods and especially mineral wagons condemned the nation to the loose coupled 60-wagon Victorian railway it stll largely had 60 years later. 

 

The reasons for this have been rehearsed many times and, I think, have been shown to have much more to do with the economics of the coal industry than any failure of the railway industry.

 

35 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

The exception was the Southern, which was extending its 3rd rail 750vdc network, which was tbh pretty much obsoleter for all excpet inner suburban work by then; more backward thinking, and continued for another quarter century with main line schemes.  There were reasons for this backward mentality, though I am not really qualified in terms of engineering or business economics to say if they were valid reasons or not!  

 

I think you have to look at the economics of electrification, certainly as they were at the time and indeed today. With the British structure gauges, overhead electrification generally requires considerable rebuilding of overbridges to provide safe clearances. That's tolerable out in the countryside on the main lines but in the more densely-developed south east could quickly look prohibitive.

[PhilJ W]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

The reasons for this have been rehearsed many times and, I think, have been shown to have much more to do with the economics of the coal industry than any failure of the railway industry.

 

 

I think you have to look at the economics of electrification, certainly as they were at the time and indeed today. With the British structure gauges, overhead electrification generally requires considerable rebuilding of overbridges to provide safe clearances. That's tolerable out in the countryside on the main lines but in the more densely-developed south east could quickly look prohibitive.

Yet the LB&SC had AC OHLE from before WW1 that was replaced by third rail DC c. 1930. 

[Zomboid]

10 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

Yet the LB&SC had AC OHLE from before WW1 that was replaced by third rail DC c. 1930. 

The clearances needed by 6.6kV are much lower than I'd needed by 25kV, and in 1908 attitudes to safely mean they would probably have been even tighter.

[DenysW]

I have so far failed to find out what pressure the pre-Grouping and Grouping companies put on the coal and mineral extraction companies to get them to change, or what the common carrier restraints on them were.

 

I can't believe that if the company's pricing was per wagon-mile (not per ton-mile), with a reduction for multiple wagons/same destination that the larger mines wouldn't have changed. With non-tariff pressure as well: braked 40 ton wagons take 2 days before collection. Unbraked wagons take 10-14 days. Etc.

[Compound2632]

57 minutes ago, DenysW said:

I have so far failed to find out what pressure the pre-Grouping and Grouping companies put on the coal and mineral extraction companies to get them to change, or what the common carrier restraints on them were.

 

There were Royal Commissions into the coal industry in 1919 and 1927, the reports of which ought to findable online, I believe, though I haven't got there yet. From previous discussions on RMWeb, I gather that the 1927 report discussed the whole question of PO wagons vs railway-owned wagons, taking evidence from both sides - so I think that would be the place to start reading.

 

57 minutes ago, DenysW said:

I can't believe that if the company's pricing was per wagon-mile (not per ton-mile), with a reduction for multiple wagons/same destination that the larger mines wouldn't have changed. With non-tariff pressure as well: braked 40 ton wagons take 2 days before collection. Unbraked wagons take 10-14 days. Etc.

 

As far as I'm aware, charging was per ton-mile, with, I suppose, an additional charge if using a railway company wagon. I suspect that such differential charging would not have been legal. The Great Western tried 20 ton steel wagons but without much success.

 

As I understand it, the fundamental problem was that a coal mine was not a wise long-term investment, as it could become unworkable rather quickly - it was always a case of take the profit now. So there was no incentive to make the investment in the pit-head facilities that would have been necessary to handle larger wagons. 

 

Once nationalisation came along, nearly 20 years late (it came close in 1919), the priority for what little cash there was available was, quite rightly, improved working conditions for the colliers, such as shower blocks.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Compound2632

[JimC]

If you research the 'Felix Pole' wagons on the GWR that was one initiative for higher capacity wagons, albeit still loose coupled and hand braked. Churchward's 40 ton bogie coal wagons were considered to have a greater tare weight and train length than two 20ton.

But fundamentally wasn't the problem that changing over required huge capital investment at every stage of coal handling and the changeover to be substantially complete before there was any return? 

[Johnson044]

15 hours ago, 33C said:

Now, a little something for the South Devon Banks.........

That has been so imaginatively and thoughtfully done. A really fine piece of work.

[DenysW]

LMS used 40 ton (net) wagons, built at Crewe in the late 1920s inspired by German designs, to get coal to its Stonebridge Park power station. 57 tons total per wagon. They only built 30 however.

 

 

[rockershovel]

On 06/09/2021 at 12:43, Compound2632 said:

 

I was rather pleased with the analogy I thought of late yesterday evening, so I'll post it anyway:

 

We planned Sunday dinner. There were two problems:

1. What to have for the main course;
2. What to have for desert.

The joint of beef I'd bought turned out to be a bit on the small side for a family of four, including two young adults, so had not adequately solved problem (1). The cheesecake we made was a superb solution to problem (2) but it was never intended as a main course.

 

On the early LMS, the main course was the WCML expresses; desert was the need for modern intermediate express power, the two young adults were the increasing weight of the Anglo-Scottish expresses in the post-Great War years, the joint of beef was the Claughton and Hughes 4-6-0 and the cheescake was of course the Compound.

I assume the horse radish sauce represented the hot axleboxes?

[rockershovel]

Regarding wagons, coal and obsolescent design, it's worth bearing in mind that the British industry never learnt to make the large to very large steel castings which the Americans successfully used for applications ranging from tank hulls to locomotive chassis. The 1930s also showed the complete inability of the British system to make effective use of profits; whatever else nationalisation did or didn't do, it swept away the old system and transformed the coal mines into a world-class centre of technical excellence. 

[The Johnster]

On 06/09/2021 at 21:37, Zomboid said:

On 06/09/2021 at 21:21, PhilJ W said:

 

The clearances needed by 6.6kV are much lower than I'd needed by 25kV,

Are they though?  Back in the early 60s my brother in law was employed after graduating as an electrical engineer from Birmingham University by A.E.I., and one of his first tasks was to design switchgear on board the AL4 electric locos being built at the time for the automatic switching required for OHLE passing beneath bridges in urban areas, which was intended to be stepped down from 25kv to 6.6kv because of this clearance issue.  In the event the lower voltage was never used and 25kv supplied throughout the system, with not that many people having been fried as a consequence.