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Imaginary Locomotives


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2 hours ago, rodent279 said:

Thanks, I don't intend to build one, my scratchbuilding skills are about on a par with my ballet dancing skills.....:blink:

I'm just interested to know more about it.

That's s very good model you made, I reckon an RTR model would be hard pressed to better it. I love the red & cream colour scheme, it's a pity there wasn't a production run.

Cheers Rodent, yeah it's an interesting thing and a shame more wernt made but it was a bit complex by look of things.

 

If you can turf up a copy of the prototypes issue of modern locomotives illustrated that has a good bit of detail on it, I think my potted history mostly came from there and a couple of other bits I'd found.

 

Itl be interesting to see how the KR Models version compares, I havnt got my name down for one but if I see one going cheap I'll snap one up. I think they are doing green and blue liveried ones too.

All the best

James

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3 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

alright, as for the exercise in futility known as restarting this thread, what if the BR adopted a similar policy to American diesels, building weak diesels in both cabbed and cabless variety

What for? US railroad practice is essentially to maximise train length and minimise train numbers. UK railway practice focuses on traffic density, running train lengths which haven't really changed since the First World War. There WERE double headed freight workings in the diesel era but they were never common and  I can't remember when I last saw one. 

Edited by rockershovel
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16 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

What for? US railroad practice is essentially to maximise train length and minimise train numbers. UK railway practice focuses on traffic density, running train lengths which haven't really changed since the First World War. There WERE double headed freight workings in the diesel era but they were never common and  I can't remember when I last saw one. 

 

USA/Canada: run longer trains.
UK/Europe: run more trains.

 

The 1350hp EMD FT of 1939 wasn't weak, they just needed 3 or 4 of them to replace one 4000-5000 hp steam loco.

 

Cheers
David

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1 hour ago, DavidB-AU said:

 

USA/Canada: run longer trains.
UK/Europe: run more trains.

 

The 1350hp EMD FT of 1939 wasn't weak, they just needed 3 or 4 of them to replace one 4000-5000 hp steam loco.

 

Cheers
David

Which would still represent a considerable saving over steam in manpower and operational flexibility, as well as fuel efficiency.

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Most of the summary below has been taken from the frequent suggestions in this thread of using Garratts on the UK system. The LMS Garratts (the only ones numerous enough to be called a class) were designed to replace a double-headed pair of 700 hp (4F) locos, so must have developed at least 1400 hp at 25 mph. LMS struggled to make them fit the LMS sub-set of British railway network, and they mostly did Toton-Brent via Wellingborough or Rugby, and weren't seen further from the traditional Midlands than York, Chinley, Gloucester, and Peterborough. In essence running 87 coal wagons (the Brent run) needed so much extra in passing loops, different signalling blocks, quadrupling and/or dedicated goods lines, that the investment was excessive for the expected efficiency savings. There's also the much gnawed-over topic of the loose-coupled unbraked wagons that formed the load, and the limit that the strength of these couplings imposed on the number of wagons that could be pulled.

 

So to use the US model you have to re-work the civil infrastructure of the UK network, and replace all the wagons. And that's without getting into the restrictive UK loading gauge. All fixable with really deep pockets and matching long arms, but probably needed to have been started in 1900, not 1947 or 1955.

 

Sigh.

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3 hours ago, rockershovel said:

There WERE double headed freight workings in the diesel era but they were never common and  I can't remember when I last saw one. 

 

Apart from class 20s of course, which were a way of utilising reliable but low-powered units, somewhat in the US fashion.  And I recall pairs of 37s on the GE main line on the 80s being fairly frequent.  The influx of Type 5 power from the 90s onward did away with double heading, except for specialist applications like nuclear flask trains.

 

6 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

alright, as for the exercise in futility known as restarting this thread, what if the BR adopted a similar policy to American diesels, building weak diesels in both cabbed and cabless variety

 

Pretty much what the LMS was doing in 1948 with the twins, built to operate alone as a Class 5 equivalent or in multiple for Class 8 work.  Dieselisation with essentially Type 3 locos would have been a very practical solution (I've suggested before that EE could have offered their 12SVT at that power and an axle loading about the same as a 37 by 1955), but I suspect the idea of replacing single Class 8 steam locos with double-headed diesels was politically unnacceptable.

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1 minute ago, JimC said:

Not to mention spectacularly expensive!

 

True, but the number of trains that actually needed Class 8 power wasn't huge, so perhaps the cost could have been born. I'm assuming a lot of the short-lived low powered stuff would not have been bought, which would produce some savings.

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There were quite a lot of class 6 and 7 steam locos though, how would their duties have been covered? You could end up with quite a lot of double heading, to the point that a type 4 (a proper 2500hp ones, not a 40) would be a sensible choice for those jobs and two type 3s for the class 8/ type 5 work. On the WCML and Southern most of the class 6/7/8 passenger work was electrified, and the actual requirement elsewhere on the network for type 5 diesels was met by 22 locos, with type 4s sufficing everywhere else.

 

Of course whether traffic requirements drove loco provison, or loco capability drives traffic provision is an interesting angle to think about.

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What's the cost analysis for maintaining one basic type to cover almost all jobs, accepting that its full power is not needed for many of the tasks?  Does standardisation on one type bring more cost benefits in terms of maintenance, training, etc., than running an over-powered engine?  I suppose class 47 ended up something like this.

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1 hour ago, MikeOxon said:

What's the cost analysis for maintaining one basic type to cover almost all jobs, accepting that its full power is not needed for many of the tasks?  Does standardisation on one type bring more cost benefits in terms of maintenance, training, etc., than running an over-powered engine?  I suppose class 47 ended up something like this.

Having looked at this thoroughly, I feel like I have a decent answer. Looking at the costs, it just doesn't make sense. Yes something like a Class 47 can shunt at a forgotten quarry in North Wales, but it'll be chugging fuel at rates comparable to the pug it replaced, removing 1 of the benefits of dieselisation. Use of 1 large type over 5 types of scaling power also results in tracks system-wide having to be upgraded to handle such a machine, which quickly and heavily mounts up in costs. On top of this, a noted issue would be underutilisation of the locomotive. A Class 47 in work a Class 04 would do might actively be the definition of Overkill.

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Shunting in locations which need a lot of shunting might well benefit from a specialist machine. Though if it's the kind of forgotten quarry which is shunted once a week then the train loco is probably the better choice as it eliminates the need for a local machine of any type. It wasn't the shunters which were superfluous though, it was the type 1 and 2 locos which would have been better just not being built, with loads of type 3s being able to do their work instead. The class 37 was as close as you'd ever find to a go-anywhere machine.

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In practice, following the end of small steam locos in about 1965, there was an unfulfilled need for a loco that could conveniently shunt in yards or as a station pilot, and run fast enough to keep out of the way on trip and transfer work.  There were several 'near misses' for this role; the 204hp shunting locos were fast enough but not powerful enough, the 350hp locos were too slow but in many cases all that was available, and the various Type 1s had either fallen at the hurdle of reliability or were unsuitable on grounds of visibility.  The 20s were dedicated to mineral haulage in nose to nose pairs.  In this scenario, a centre cab Type 2 or 3 that can be used for other work at different times of the day has some attraction even to the bean counters. 

 

The 08 was peerless as a yard shunting loco, but not much good at anything else.  There was not much that replaced the plethora of steam 0-6-0s, both tank and tender, with driving wheels between 4'7" and 5'3", that could happily run up to 50 or 60mph and which had reasonable forward and rear visibility from the cab compared to the Type 1s that were the 1955 Plan's concept of a diesel that would do their work.  There had been a paradigm shift in traffic between 1955 and 1965, with much of the pickup and short haul work that was the remit of these locos vanishing,  The result was that orders for unsuccessful Type 1s had been cancelled and the locos withdrawn early as the perception was that there was no work for any except the 20s in pairs, and a loco with more than one cab on shunting work is a non starter.

 

The Clayton/Rolls Royce DHP1 might have been an answer to this, and I am not conversant with the reasons it was not adopted, but it was in some ways a throwback to the Fell, with multiple engines, 4 of them, and I would have thought a new centre cab hydraulic at the same time as the 14s were dropping like flies was unlikely to win many friends on BR.  To get that amount of power into a loco with such low profile bonnets was something of an achievment.  The Type 1 Claytons had not covered themselves in glory and the sight of a centre cab loco in the mid 60s might not have inspired confidence!  There were successful similar locos in France and Germany, though.

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4 hours ago, Zomboid said:

There were quite a lot of class 6 and 7 steam locos though, how would their duties have been covered? You could end up with quite a lot of double heading, to the point that a type 4 (a proper 2500hp ones, not a 40) would be a sensible choice for those jobs and two type 3s for the class 8/ type 5 work. On the WCML and Southern most of the class 6/7/8 passenger work was electrified, and the actual requirement elsewhere on the network for type 5 diesels was met by 22 locos, with type 4s sufficing everywhere else.

 

Of course whether traffic requirements drove loco provison, or loco capability drives traffic provision is an interesting angle to think about.

I think I've commented before that looking to replace like-for-like was usually BR's problem.  Instead of trying to find a diesel equivalent of a Coronation able to haul a 15 coach train at 2 or 3-hour intervals, what was needed was something capable of express timings on 10 coaches at hourly intervals.  For the first 10-15 years of their lives, EE Type 4s (Class 40s) actually did this very effectively and quite reliably.

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In 1955, with a 1955 mindset, like for like was the name of the game and the only one in town.  Costs were spiralling but the traffic was much as it had been since the turn of the 20th century; let's have a Modernisation Plan to bring greater efficiency and cut costs.  Actually, the Plan was highly successful in the circumstances given the disastrous fall in traffic over the next decade, paving the way for block traffic, air brakes, airconditioned trains at normal fares.  The loco policy was a disaster as we all know, too many types ordered in quantity before full trialling, too many underpowered Type 1s and Type 2s, a failure to provide powerful enough Type 4s to avoid them being thrashed.  It would be interesting to speculate how much better the loco situation might have been had The Plan been published in 1960, when 2nd generation supercharged diesels and better, lighter, smaller generators were avaialable.  DP1 showed what could be done within the British loading gauge in 1955, but probably not what should have been done, given the cost of running this prima donna.

 

Part of the reason for this was the inexplicable mismatch between actual steam performance and the figures obtained from the Rugby Testing Station, which for example suggested that a King could put out 1,800hp continuously.  Probably true but it could probably nearly double that for short periods climbing Hatton, Dainton, or from Severn Tunnel bottom to Badminton, which the 1.800hp D600 Warship which was supposed to replace it couldn't.

 

1955, as it turned out, was probably the worst possible time to backtrack on the 1948 intention to provide modern, easily prepared and disposed, standard steam locos.  With the benefit of a hindsight not available to those who devised the plan (with, we must remember the best of intentions), we know that the following 5 years were marked by devastating falls in traffic as bigger, more efficient. long distance lorries were able to deliver goods door to door more quickly and cheaply than BR, and the beginning of the motorway construction era during which road transport became even more attractive to customers.  The common carrier requirment forced BR to provide uneconomic general merchandise carriage from local goods depots, traffic which dropped out the bottom of the market until the Beeching era and a new Transport Act relieved BR of the burden. 

 

Private car ownership also increased exponentially during this period, to the detriment of the long distance first class trade that had long been the railways' most profitable.  Convenience for the customer to maximise what market was left suggested more but shorter trains at more frequent intervals, which meant more locomotives than were thought to be needed to replace steam.  On the WR, a shed that was allocated a diesel locomotive had to withdraw 3 equivalent steam locos to 'pay' for it; the diesel's better availability meant it could do the work of 3 steam.  It couldn't, because there as well as there being more passenger trains to haul at greater frequency to compete with private cars and long distance coach travel on improved roads, the diesel had to be thrashed to keep to steam timings even with the lightened loads and reliability suffered.  The timetable came worrying close to complete collapse in 1961 and 2 as the failed Warships blocking bays at Swindon prevented repairs to steam locos, of which there was a dearth of good condition examples, while the region's management was committed to full dieselisation before any other on BR (the ER were the main competition in this).

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Low power type 2 class 25. Unstressed 1250hp Sulzer, need more power? Two in multiple, 90mph ! I never went quite that fast on one! but I bounced my way, as a second man from Crewe to Banbury and around the West Midlands. Brilliant bit of kit, full power from 20mph and they just got down and pulled. Not that I'm biased!

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Johnster, I think that is a very well reasoned post from a man who had his feet on the ground whilst all that stuff was going on.

  What makes me cross is the huge amount of tax payers money that was wasted by government pulling in so many different directions at the same time.

  

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At Canton in the 70s we had a 90mph Gloucester job out and back with the 00.35 Cardiff-Peterborough parcels, 4E11, can’t recall the reporting number coming back now, load 4 GUVs.  Initially with a Hymek, pleasure to come to work shame to take the money not that I ever gave any back…. Then some idiot decided that a 25 would be ok to replace Canton’s Hymeks with.  31s maybe, but…
 

A 25 will do 90mph all right, but most of it’s effort is expended vertically to the extent that the springs bottom out; an hour of this was serious back pain and one driver reckoned he was 2 inches shorter in Gloucester than he’d been in Cardiff and another 2 in when he got back to Cardiff from Gloucester.  On top of that, one was frozen by draughts because the ccab windows shook open and deafened by the sheer volume as she banged and crashed her way along. 
 

Dreadful things.  

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On 22/09/2021 at 20:08, ScottishRailFanatic said:

I see your German DH, and I raise you a Class 19!

9B88F4EE-BA87-4B91-AAF0-0854E381B0F7.jpeg

 

How about a Swindon version of this:

"Turkish Crocodile" - TCDD diesel locomotive Nr. 27003 (Krauss Maffei Locomotive Works, Munich)

Turkey Railways - "Turkish Crocodile" - TCDD diesel locomotive Nr. 27003 (Krauss Maffei Locomotive Works, Munich)

 

Edited by Andy Kirkham
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