Imaginary Locomotives

[whart57]

25 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I don't understand your use of the present tense. They were used to manage a train's progress; to regard them as having been solely parking brakes is to overlook the historical evidence. Relevant topic here, including period footage:

 

 

Pinning the brakes down on an unfitted goods was a real cludge wasn't it? It was done because the brakes were there - for use in yards - not because they were designed like that.

 

If you look at the development of hand brakes on British freight wagons it is clear their prime function was to hold wagons in their parked position. You would not have brakes fitted to one side only, as was common in the nineteenth century, if you intended to apply them while on the move. Pinning the brakes - in other words part applying them and putting a pin into a hole to keep them in that position - to slow the progress of a train down a slope is a wonderful piece of railway operation, but it was a pragmatic approach to a problem using the tools available. And a modern Health and Safety Executive would have kittens.

 

The thing is, continuous brakes were made compulsory on passenger trains in the 1889, but no-one thought through the obvious next step that freight should also be continuously braked. Or perhaps they did and thought the fight to convince railway company executives of that was too much. The opportunity was certainly not taken to give railways a period in which to introduce continuous braking, a period in which existing stock could work out its lifespan. Instead RCH specifications for wagon builders in 1907 and 1923 still permitted the building of short wheelbase and unfitted wagons. That the 1923 spec did not even make the provision of a through-pipe compulsory is quite unforgivable really.

[JimC]

6 minutes ago, whart57 said:

Pinning the brakes down on an unfitted goods was a real cludge wasn't it? It was done because the brakes were there - for use in yards - not because they were designed like that.

 

If you look at the development of hand brakes on British freight wagons it is clear their prime function was to hold wagons in their parked position. You would not have brakes fitted to one side only,

Do you think that's stretching it a bit? No disputing the essential flakiness, but the need to pin down brakes on inclines was part of railway operation from the earliest days when realistically there was no choice. At least some early passenger trains had multiple brake vans to provide the same ability to brake on multiple vehicles. I don't think it can be regarded as a kludge because several generations of wagon were built like that. From what I can make out the primary motive for either side brakes was accidents to shunters crossing the track in front of moving wagons, esp fly shunting, to apply brakes. I imagine the assumption was that there would always be enough wagons with brakes on the desired side to brake a train. 

I think the bigger challenge was not so much persuading railway executives as persuading private owner wagon execs that continuous brakes were needed. The vast fleet of minimally maintained private owner wagons was the real problem, and even if vacuum fitting had been mandated, wouldn't it have resulted in trains of leaking pipes and cylinders and constant delays with vacuum brake problems? 
 

[DenysW]

I do like the idea of the panto design meeting with the topic being the steaming capacity of a new design with the debate being:

 

-   It steams perfectly well

-  OH NO IT DOESN'T

-   OH YES IT DOES

 

Having just read "The History of the Midland Railway" (1901) written by C.E. Stretton, yes there is lot of overt bias in some of the old accounts. Isn't Cox supposed to be relentlessly pro-Horwich? Stretton just seems to have thought that the Midland was run by wise, thoughtful people* for the public benefit and for the benefit of their shareholders, whilst gallantly resisting the unscrupulous tactics of the devious LNWR and MSLR, occasionally also the L&YR.

 

* Except Hudson

Edited November 17, 2021 by DenysW
Add footnote

[DenysW]

From 'Northroader' about French wagons:

 

" It would appear that brakes applied by a side lever appeared in the twentieth century, but were not universal. Air braking also started to be applied from roughly 1890, and new wagons with airbrakes also had longer bodies, higher capacity, but also longer wheelbase, to improve track running for higher speeds. Freight train operation could then be classed as “RA” (regime accelere) for fast services, and “RO” (regime ordinaire) for slow unbraked trains, with older designs of wagons."

 

Where there was a will there was a way.

[Compound2632]

52 minutes ago, whart57 said:

Pinning the brakes down on an unfitted goods was a real cludge wasn't it?

 

If you look at the 1958 Railway Roundabout footage in that other topic, you can see a real cludge in action...

 

34 minutes ago, JimC said:

The vast fleet of minimally maintained private owner wagons was the real problem, 

 

I'm afraid there is another unhistorical misconception at work here. The maintenance of PO wagons was a problem at certain periods: during and after WW2, when they were pooled and owners had neither the incentive nor the manpower for proper maintenance, and up to the 1880s. In the intervening period, two factors were at work: the system of inspection and registration of PO wagons by the main line companies, introduced through the RCH in 1887, along with a set of standards that new wagons had to meet in order to pass inspection; and the system of hire purchase or simple hire under which the majority of PO wagons were financed. The latter generally included repair and maintenance contracts; I think one can make the case that on average, PO wagons were better-maintained during this period than railway company wagons.

[The Johnster]

Good point; appearances can be deceptive, and the dire external state that many got into in the inter-war period, the more obvious to those who recalled an earlier period in which many POs were kept in a very clean external state owing to their value to their owners as moblie advertising hoardings, is not necessarily an indication of their running condition; in fact it never was!  They were not what you'd call high-tech, easy to keep in reasonable running order with the resources available at collieries, marshalling yards, and so on, rotten and damaged woodwork being easy to replace and the door hinges and securing pins being well made and robust.  They were the most common occupants of cripple sidings, but this needs to be considered in the light of the indisputable point that they were, by a big margin, the most common sort of wagon on the railway system as a whole, and in the coalfield areas anything other than a PO 7-planker seemed to be a relative rarity.  When they were pooled, the RCH was unable to say how many there, a situation repeated when BR tried to take stock.

 

That said, the sight of a long train of loaded XPOs in early BR days from a head on viewpoint with the sides visibly straining under the loads and flexing and bowing in and out over several inches, could be a little alarming, even at quite low speeds.  The replacement by steel bodied wagons was an inevitable move that eased the burden of bodywork maintenance considerably, but the acid content of the loads gave problems with rotting of the floors and they had thier own maintenance issues. 

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

inter-war period 

 

I think you mean post-war there? But your post paints a positively poetic picture, as ever.

[Johnson044]

19 hours ago, 298 said:

 

There were at least 20 steam to diesel conversions, with the one on your photo reported elsewhere to indeed have origins from a Manning Wardle steam engine and has since been converted back to an approximation of its original condition and is at Christina Museum in Havana.

Yes - that's the one. There seem to have been two MW outside cylindered 0-6-0's imported to Cuba direct from the Boyne loco works. Not sure of date. Suspect early 1870's. Sorry - 2'6" not 3' gauge. Here's the one at the Christina Station museum. I seem to remember an article in Heritage Railway a few years ago which showed not much more than the wheels and frames so (if it's the same loco, which I suspect it is) someone has either cannibalized two together or retrieved the boiler from somewhere and re-united it with the under-works. The smokebox and cylinders look to be representational rather than original part or true replicas though.

[The Johnster]

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I think you mean post-war there? But your post paints a positively poetic picture, as ever.

No, I meant the inter-war period, though the point stands in respect to post war.  The Great War and it's aftermath, leading to the economic problems of the 30s, marked the end of the era of clean and freshly painted PO wagons, not to mention the high gleam of locomotives with polished brass and copperwork (which largely disappeared with the 'one man one engine' system), and the more complex liveries as well.

 

The pooling arrangements, which predated WW2 by a year or so, were the absolute end of this world; nobody wanted to clean somebody else's wagon.  By the end WW2, the XPOs were in pretty poor external condition, and the older survivors in pretty dire mechanical state.  BR's response to this, and the deleterious condition of goods stock generally, was to set up the 'Ideal Wagons Committee', which sounds like the worst sort of ineffective beauraucratic talking shop, but which in reality was extremely efficient and effective.

 

It set up a sort of wagon triage, improving the more recent general merchandise types by giving them vacuum brakes and instanter or screw couplings as part of a full overhaul and repaint, patching up anything that was good for a few more years (into which category many XPOs fell), and scrapping hundreds of thousands of various types that did not make the grade, and it is not unlikely that many of these had become liabilities 20 years or more earlier.  It was not unusual up to the early 60s to see yards or even disused sections of main line track used to store these casualties, on which the wood mostly rotted and the only thing left for the scrappies was the frames and wheels.  These were by and large pre-grouping types and the older XPOs.  The changes this brought about in the condition of the wagon fleet in general, coupled with the late 50s fall in traffic and the introduction of volume produced BR standard wagons, meant that the IWC's work was complete in about a decade.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

No, I meant the inter-war period, though the point stands in respect to post war.  The Great War and it's aftermath, leading to the economic problems of the 30s, marked the end of the era of clean and freshly painted PO wagons, not to mention the high gleam of locomotives with polished brass and copperwork (which largely disappeared with the 'one man one engine' system), and the more complex liveries as well.

 

The pooling arrangements, which predated WW2 by a year or so, were the absolute end of this world;

 

To take the last point first: the pooling arrangements introduced during the Great War did not affect PO wagons. There was considerable rationalisation of the maintenance of PO wagons with the formation of Wagon Repairs Ltd in 1918 from the wagon maintenance operations of the big wagon firms, but the system of repair contracts continued. The photo here was taken in 1940...

 

It's certainly true that there was a decline19th century standards of cleanliness (not maintenance) for railway company stock but that and the adoption of black for goods engines and simplified liveries elsewhere started in the Edwardian period. It was the 10 then 8 hour day that was the real culprit, not the Great War.

[whart57]

Painting goods engines black or with simplified liveries was already being done in Victorian times. For example on the SER around 1870, passenger engines were as you'd expect, nicely varnished paint, elaborately lined out with polished brass and copper work. Goods engines on the other hand were painted in a basic colour (a bilious green according to Ahrons) and had simple black lining. Goods engines on their last period before scrapping were called "coal engines" and ran in unlined black.

[Compound2632]

23 minutes ago, whart57 said:

 Goods engines on their last period before scrapping were called "coal engines" and ran in unlined black.

 

Indeed. The LNWR's Coal Engines (a distinct class) along with some other goods-only engines, were in unlined black for many years, until full lining out for all engines became the order of the day around the turn of the century, only for unlined black for all repainted engines to become the norm during the Great War.

[whart57]

I am tempted at this point to make a suggestion about Ahrons' "sea green of a particularly bilious hue". The official description was that goods engine livery was olive green. However olive green pigments fade to sea green, something I noticed on my visits to Thailand where plinthed locos that have been out in the sun a few years go that way. Which suggests that goods locos were less regular visitors to the paint shops as well as having simpler liveries.

[Johnson044]

Here is one of the Cuban MW 0-6-0ST's that was so brutally mistreated:

[Johnson044]

Also found this amazing beast. Maybe if the order had been cancelled and NBL found itself with the locos on its hands? I've not given any thought into the economic / political situations prevailing at the time but without the cow catcher, headlight, the (?) in front of the safety valve and with normal British drawgear and buffers maybe the Furness or G & SW might have ended up with them in an alternative universe?

[Nick Holliday]

On 18/11/2021 at 08:32, whart57 said:

Painting goods engines black or with simplified liveries was already being done in Victorian times. For example on the SER around 1870, passenger engines were as you'd expect, nicely varnished paint, elaborately lined out with polished brass and copper work. Goods engines on the other hand were painted in a basic colour (a bilious green according to Ahrons) and had simple black lining. Goods engines on their last period before scrapping were called "coal engines" and ran in unlined black.

It is little known, but Stroudley, of the infamous "Improved Engine Green" was reprimanded in 1883 by a director of the LBSCR for painting a number of locos in unlined black.  His reply was "There are five old engines at present employed shed piloting.  They are painted black on account of their duties and seldom come under the eye of the public." Unfortunately one had strayed from its home in New Cross shed into London Bridge station, where it had been spotted.

[John Besley]

41 minutes ago, Johnson044 said:

Also found this amazing beast. Maybe if the order had been cancelled and NBL found itself with the locos on its hands? I've not given any thought into the economic / political situations prevailing at the time but without the cow catcher, headlight, the (?) in front of the safety valve and with normal British drawgear and buffers maybe the Furness or G & SW might have ended up with them in an alternative universe?

 

That's one thing I've often puzzled over the UK had alternative loco manufacturing to the big 4 yet almost never got a look in apart from NBL who built some locos to help out at under capacity in a couple of instance.

 

Just suppose they where given a free hand what might they have come up with...

[Corbs]

Not design, but they did build locos designed in-house by the Big Four, for example the Jinties and the 5700 Panniers.

[JimC]

One of the side effects of the grouping was that almost all of the small lines who didn't build their own locomotives disappeared. 

We can note the GWR 1101 class, which was really a lightly modified Avonside design and built by Avonside. The GWR had a curious reluctance to build 0-4-0Ts.

[Compound2632]

4 hours ago, John Besley said:

That's one thing I've often puzzled over the UK had alternative loco manufacturing to the big 4 yet almost never got a look in apart from NBL who built some locos to help out at under capacity in a couple of instance.

 

Just suppose they where given a free hand what might they have come up with...

 

As @Corbs posted, what? And in the pre-Grouping period, there were many lines that relied on the trade for their locomotives - the Midland is a prime example - batches of five or ten at Derby, typically built as renewals on revenue account, but when it was 50 or 100 new goods engines needed, it was off to Sharps, Neilsons, etc.

 

1 hour ago, JimC said:

We can note the GWR 1101 class, which was really a lightly modified Avonside design and built by Avonside. The GWR had a curious reluctance to build 0-4-0Ts.

 

They were no different to the other big four in that respect and you can count on the toes of one foot the pre-Grouping companies that built more than a handful of 0-4-0Ts. The main line companies simply didn't have the kind of jobs for which such an engine was suited.

[PenrithBeacon]

Post group the government asked the railways to use the private sector a lot. All it did was drive down prices especially as AW  took over the tank factory on Tyneside and started making steam locomotives there.

[Compound2632]

3 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

Post group the government asked the railways to use the private sector a lot. All it did was drive down prices especially as AW  took over the tank factory on Tyneside and started making steam locomotives there.

 

I understood that to be a post-Armistice measure the help tide over the transition from armaments manufacture, e.g. the ninety LNWR Prince of Wales class locomotives built by Beardmore in 1920-21.

[PenrithBeacon]

It went on right through to WW2 and it drove Nasmyth Wilson out of business. Their factory in Patricroft was sold to Royal Ordnance in the late thirties just before the government bought out the AW Tyneside factory for tank production. 

The effect of the use of British factories by the railways was to drive down prices so the likes of Nasmyth had to rely on overseas orders for their profits,  but then they were competing against US and European suppliers who even cheaper and had a guaranteed, profitable, domestic market 

Bit of a mess really. 

[Corbs]

6 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I understood that to be a post-Armistice measure the help tide over the transition from armaments manufacture, e.g. the ninety LNWR Prince of Wales class locomotives built by Beardmore in 1920-21.

Were the Woolwich N Class 'kits' part of the same initiative?

 

[Compound2632]

4 minutes ago, Corbs said:

Were the Woolwich N Class 'kits' part of the same initiative?

 

Having them built at Woolwich, yes, I believe so.