Imaginary Locomotives

[tythatguy1312]

arguably what shocks me most about James is that he wasn't built, as Moguls are ideal light mixed-traffic engines and would be well suited to the many jobs James is depicted doing (stopping passenger, mixed freights, light expresses). He represents a logical evolutionary path for several railways, yet only the Caledonian ever got close with the 34 class.

[whart57]

Plenty of Moguls were built, just not many with inside cylinders.

[brack]

55 minutes ago, whart57 said:

Plenty of Moguls were built, just not many with inside cylinders.

The DSER ones are the direct result of building progressively bigger 060s which led to several derailments of locos too heavy at the front end, so an additional axle was stuck there to spread the weight, rather than to guide the loco into curves as the pony truck acted on most outside cylinder moguls.

 

 

This loco and its sister were originally designed as 060s, but before building commenced they decided to add the extra axle - the solution that had been adopted pre ww1 when the previous class of big 060s had a series of derailments due to excess weight on the front axle.

 

Not exactly pretty though...

The caledonian 34 class's leading carrying axle was a radial truck, but without curved guides. The rationale for these was similar to the irish locos - adding a superheater to the 060 design made the front end too heavy, hence additional carrying wheels were tacked on.

 

The GSWR locos i think had a proper pony truck though, but they were again a development of an existing inside cylinder 060 - superheating and bigger cylinders necessitating the front end change.

 

 

So I'd suggest that all of the inside cylinder 260s in these isles were originally started/intended as 060s, with the front end lengthened out of a need to carry weight, rather than being conceived as a modern 260 in the way the GWR 43xx/GNR H3/LBSC K/SECR N were, or indeed Adams' GER moguls from 30 years earlier, which are closer to the result of adapting a 440* for fast freight with smaller wheels than stretching a dumpy 060 until it gets too big at the front. The only uk inside cylinder 260 that developed as a freight version of 440s were the gw aberdares.

 

 

*yes, I know the 43xx were developed from the prairies, but my point is they began as a modern outside cylinder 260

[The Johnster]

The 43xx were a result of observation of American 'short line' practice, which by the early 1900s featured a single mogul that did all the work, passenger and freight, and was equally capable of both, arguably the genesis of the 20th century British 'mixed traffic' concept.  Previously, such work was done by the misleadingly named 'goods' 0-6-0s, which had large enough driving wheels to pop along at a suitable rate with local stoppers, excursions, and any other passenger work that presented itself, as well as all forms of general merchandise freight work including the express freights of the day.  They were natural partners to express 4-4-0s that used the same boilers and engines.  The third component was a 'mineral' 0-6-0, with smaller driving wheels that could manage the 20mph or so needed for that work, usually not given automatic brakes.

 

I'm not convinced that an inside cylinder mogul is a natural progression of a Victorian 0-6-0 'goods'  The restricted working space between the frames that was already beginning to hamper the deployment of larger cylinders would have been further compromised by the leading axle and springing, and it made more sense to move up to an outside cylinder mogul to advance from the 'goods' 0-6-0s; I say advance rather than replace, as by and large the old 'goods' engines remained in service and many more were built, right up to WW2.  Remember that drivers had to go inbetween the frames at the front end of these locos to oil around, and space must have been very limited on the inside cylinder moguls.  The Irish and Scottish locos came about very much as responses to poor riding of front heavy 0-6-0s, and the only ones AFAIK designed at the outset as an inside cylinder mogul was the Dean/Churchward Small Kruger and the Aberdares.  These were atypical in that they were extensions of the 'mineral' type with small driving wheels, never intended to run at much more than about 25mph, and, having outside frames, overcame the limited working space at the front end problem.  They were provided with vacuum brakes because the GW considered that all of it's locomotives should, if needed, be able to work all of the trains.

 

The other Edwardian moguls, all outside cylinder examples, were regarded as big engines, and by the standards of the day they were certainly not small.  Pioneered on the GN which introduced the 'big boiler' idea with them and the later Atlantics, and the LBSC and others as well as Holcroft's 43xx which rapidly became a GW standard, they were a general type that was built right through to the end of steam, with a small mogul added by Ivatt and Riddles directly in response to the age of the earlier Victorian 'goods' 0-6-0s which had reached their use by over the course of WW2 and desperately needed replacing.  By the second decade of the century, the SECR had joined in the outside cylinder mogul game and 3-cylinder examples were appearing on the GN; the type was very well established and one cannot imagine new designs of inside cylinder moguls by that time.  The concept was a dead end.

 

By the end of that war, it was generally accepted that new locomotives for main line work should have outside cylinders in order to ease the burden of preparation work, which was costly and unpleasant enough to generate a manpower shortage when alternative better paid regular shifts in clean new factories was easily had.  Outside cylinder 0-6-0s are not steady enough for main line work, though the type was common in the industrial world, the result being that withdrawn Victorian inside cylinder 'goods' locos were replaced with new outside cylinder moguls like the Ivatt 4MT and 2MT and their Riddles derivates,  The inside cyldiner 6-coupled format lived on in industrial use, though and some, arguably far too many, GW designed examples were still being built in 1954*, and introduced as late as 1949, as well as the newbuild J72s. 

 

*The reasoning behind these locos was a continuation of the GW's long standing modernisation program of replacing older panniers with the updated 16xx version, and in the case of the 94xx, the replacement of the smaller and older absorbed and constituent South Wales 0-6-2T locos.  The 15xx was a response to the success of the USATC tanks in the Bristol Channel ports.  Whether it was well founded reasoning or advisable by then is debateable. 

 

That Swindon was in general slow to react to changing situations on the ground is borne out by the 94xx replacement, the D95xx, which shoud have been cancelled, since their late start build dates gave an opportunity to respond to the undeniable and obvious fact that their intended work had vanished by 1963.  I will not give this the dignity of being debateable.  Fair to say that the loss of and change in the nature of the traffic between 1958 and 1963 was unforeseeable and unprecedented, and the Teddy Bears were probably the worst, but not the only, example from this period of BR's locomotive policy being wrong-footed and short-sighted.  It is important IMHO to take into account the reasoning behind it without the benefit of hindsight before we unreservedly condemn the admittedly faulty decision making of the time.

[JimC]

4 hours ago, The Johnster said:

reasoning behind these locos was a continuation of the GW's long standing modernisation program of replacing older panniers with the updated 16xx version,

Which probably should have been replaced with railcars since having a Riddles Std 2 or for that matter a 4575 towing a coach or two with a dozen passengers in was a pretty wasteful exercise. They aren't things I've devoted much thinking time to but I wonder why there was a ~ 15year pause between the last of the GWR cars and the first BR? 

[rodent279]

15 minutes ago, JimC said:

Which probably should have been replaced with railcars since having a Riddles Std 2 or for that matter a 4575 towing a coach or two with a dozen passengers in was a pretty wasteful exercise. They aren't things I've devoted much thinking time to but I wonder why there was a ~ 15year pause between the last of the GWR cars and the first BR? 

Well, I guess WW2 would account for 5 of those 15, and the uncertainty and general upheaval of Nationalisation at least another couple.

[LNWR18901910]

Hands up who remembers this Johnny, or rather, this Douggie?

I actually attempted a model of this in 00 scale once but it never really got for unfortunately. Would anyone be clever enough to make a simple 3D-printed body to easily fit Hornby's J94 Austerity chassis?

[Joseph the L&YR lover]

16 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

arguably what shocks me most about James is that he wasn't built, as Moguls are ideal light mixed-traffic engines and would be well suited to the many jobs James is depicted doing (stopping passenger, mixed freights, light expresses). He represents a logical evolutionary path for several railways, yet only the Caledonian ever got close with the 34 class.

If i can remember correctly there is a drawing of him, but it was only just a slight advantage compared to the standard class 28s

[Miss Prism]

3 hours ago, JimC said:

Which probably should have been replaced with railcars since having a Riddles Std 2 or for that matter a 4575 towing a coach or two with a dozen passengers in was a pretty wasteful exercise. They aren't things I've devoted much thinking time to but I wonder why there was a ~ 15year pause between the last of the GWR cars and the first BR? 

 

The GWR's experience with steam railmotors was not a particularly happy one, with too many of them spending too long in the works having their boilers lifted for cleaning, i.e. not earning revenue. Hence the reversion to a loco and autotrailer. I take the point about a small prairie with a B-set and a dozen passengers being barely economical, but at least the loco could be used on goods duties. DMUs were not so flexible. Maybe the key point is that the more specialist servicing/maintenance required by DMUs was not available on most branch lines, which therefore continued in the old way of doing things, at least until the harsh Beeching pruning. The GWR DMUs tended to be concentrated in particular areas, and could be replaced quite easily when failures occurred.

 

 

[JimC]

It is strange though. It's as if it all comes to a stop when Collett retires and nothing happens until 1952. No Hawksworth railcar for instance. 

[brack]

I'd agree that WW2 and impending nationalisation don't seem enough to stop railcar production - they were building them until 1941 anyway, and impending nationalisation didn't stop them building new steam locos, designing the counties, ordering tons of unnecessary panniers, buying gas turbines from abroad etc.

 

most of the GWR railcars weren't really built for branch line service, only no.s 18-33.

 

The others were mostly meant as high speed supplementary services between cities following the flying hamburger model, hence high speed gearing and buffet provision in many of them.

 

I'd assume the usual idea of reluctance to throw a big capital investment down some loss making branchline that could be run quite happily with existing locos. I think 18's intended use on the lamboune branch was linked to rapidly shifting horse boxes in and out, so not quite the impoverished bit of cornwall people tend to imagine or model. The railcars were kept nearer the middle of the GW empire, often on secondary mains or cross country routes, rather than being scattered off to the 4 corners.

 

I think with hindsight we look back and see them as the obvious answer to reducing operating costs on impecunious branches (in the same way the Donegal railcars were used in ireland), but that wasn't really the intention or rationale behind the gwr cars. If it had been, then you would've expected there to be a lot more of them built, and they would've been more commonly employed around the periphery of the system.

[tythatguy1312]

Whilst I do suspect the Railcars could do fine work on a Branch line, I am admittedly intrigued as to why. The GWR had 2 distinct classes of "branch line engines" (the 48xx for lighter, rural lines and the 45xx for heavier, more used lines) built just prior to the railcars.

[brack]

45xx were useful for freight working - a smallish 262t was something that the lms and br standard programme also produced.

 

48xx/14xx were pretty straight copies (with modern bits/fittings) of the ageing 517s, one might argue as to whether they were really needed, especially so late on, and it is interesting that none of the other big 4 really built an equivalent.

[tythatguy1312]

Speaking of the 1400's, I suspect they were built to save on maintenance costs. The 517's were as obsolete as you could get and everything they shared parts with had been withdrawn 30 years prior, meaning maintenance costs went up whilst reliability went down for the class. The Southern had no concern for this, keeping Terriers running into the 1960's, whilst the LNER and LMS replaced elderly engines with standardised tank engines, although that leaves me questioning why the GWR didn't just fit Autotrain gear to a 57xx to do the same work.

[brack]

1 hour ago, tythatguy1312 said:

although that leaves me questioning why the GWR didn't just fit Autotrain gear to a 57xx to do the same work.

Yes, or build 54/64xx instead which were already auto fitted. It's difficult to understand why they built the 48xx/14xx, and especially the non auto fitted 58xx. They were a touch lower in axle loading that the 54xx, but were the branches that lightly laid?

I've read one justification of the 14/48xx vs the 54xx as being a desire to have a leading carrying wheel, but surely that was only in 1 direction anyway. If anything it reminds me of the east german rekolok Saxon meyers or the rheidol tanks rather than new locomotive construction - supposed rebuilds of old locos, but using no original parts.

[whart57]

10 hours ago, Miss Prism said:

 

The GWR's experience with steam railmotors was not a particularly happy one

 

 Nobody's experience with steam railmotors was a happy one. The idea was fundamentally flawed.

Edited January 1, 2022 by whart57

[brack]

1 hour ago, whart57 said:

 Nobody's experience with steam railmotors was a happy one. The idea was fundamentally flawed.

The later sentinel ones were (comparatively) pretty decent, essentially by making the steam engine part of it rather less like a traditional steam loco.

 

The earlier ones suffered the obvious flaw of making the coaches have the same availability as a steam loco, plus varying amounts of heat, dust, noise, moisture and dirt. Separating the two and having push pull working was probably the most sensible option until diesel propulsion came of age.

[Mike 84C]

Just to drift back to Moguls, I would think that Churchward saw the Pennsylvania F classes of 2-6-0 at work. The F3 was a very capable loco built before the 43's and although bigger than a 43/53 was not large by American standards. US short lines seem to have favoured the small  2-8-0 as a very flexible machine.

  Inside cylinder Moguls were just an engineering development that allowed the use ever larger and front end heavy design 0-6-0's and when the fog had cleared were not pursued.

  For a real oddity look at Coey's  GS&WR  4-6-0, high pitched boiler, small wheels, poor performance and very rough riding, did not have a long life by Irish standards.

[burgundy]

1 hour ago, brack said:

The earlier ones suffered the obvious flaw of making the coaches have the same availability as a steam loco, plus varying amounts of heat, dust, noise, moisture and dirt. Separating the two and having push pull working was probably the most sensible option until diesel propulsion came of age.

The Brighton tried out both steam and petrol railcars in the 1900s. Surplus Terriers, modified as push-pull locos, with purpose built "balloon" carriages, proved to be a more cost effective and flexible alternative (with a notable turn of speed).  

Best wishes 

Eric 

[PhilJ W]

2 hours ago, brack said:

The later sentinel ones were (comparatively) pretty decent, essentially by making the steam engine part of it rather less like a traditional steam loco.

The LNER would have preferred to have more of the Clayton steam railmotors rather than the Sentinels but Claytons went bust in 1931. 

[JimC]

5 hours ago, brack said:

. It's difficult to understand why they built the 48xx/14xx, and especially the non auto fitted 58xx. They were a touch lower in axle loading that the 54xx, but were the branches that lightly laid?

Cook gives us a pretty good insight into the design of the 48/58/54/64/74/16 family in Swindon Steam. Apparently there were a lot of common parts between them. Its a rare insight into the actual thinking behind design decisions. It's mildly amusing that they started with a clean sheet of paper and ended up with the same configurations as their predecessors 50 years before. 

[JimC]

3 hours ago, Mike 84C said:

Just to drift back to Moguls, I would think that Churchward saw the Pennsylvania F classes of 2-6-0 at work.

According to Holcroft it was in fact usage on Canadian lines that impressed him. Holcroft went on a trip to Eastern Canada/US border. On return he wrote up the trip for his management. 

 

Then Churchward gave him the job of outlining replacements for Atbara (large wheel 4-4-0) Bulldog (med wheel 4-4-0s) and Aberdare small wheel 2-6-0s which were to be inside cylinder with 10in piston valves over the cylinders. It perhaps should be noted that the County 4-4-0s were already in existence and a small boiler version tried and abandoned. 

Apparently this didn't prove practical, so Churchward gave orders to draft a medium wheel 2-6-0, which as we know was a huge success and indeed I think the GW never built another all new 4-4-0. 

[The Johnster]

On 01/01/2022 at 00:39, JimC said:

Which probably should have been replaced with railcars since having a Riddles Std 2 or for that matter a 4575 towing a coach or two with a dozen passengers in was a pretty wasteful exercise. They aren't things I've devoted much thinking time to but I wonder why there was a ~ 15year pause between the last of the GWR cars and the first BR? 

 

This is a pretty good question, Jim, and not one that had occurred to me before.  As Rodent points out, the war and the severe austerity economy that followed it likely accounts for at least half of the time.  The GW cars were capable of 70mph or 45 with lower gearing and tail traffic, and there were no trailers, so I would assume that the rest of the delay was down to BR wanting better specs than the GW, two, three, or four car sets with enough grunt to manage trailers at 70mph, and had to wait a few years for the technology to catch up with this requirement.  The development of suitable gearboxes and transmissions, and possibly the multiple unit cabling and equipment, might have prevented or mitigated against pre-1954 dmus as well. 

 

The GW cars were satisfactory in service, and lasted until they were worn out, service lives of about 25-30 years, but were not capable of multiple working or powerful enough to haul/propel unpowered cars.  Had they been so, one would have expected auto trailer type vehicles to have been used with them.  There were the 'razor' gangwayed twin sets, one of which ran for some time in BR days as a 3-car with a Collett 60' 'trailer' in the centre, but it is I think significant that this set was based at Reading, where it was unlikely to encounter much in the way of serious gradients.  In short, they could not match the performance of the BR two car DM+DT sets unless they were power twins.

 

The running costs of the first generation BR dmus were very low when they were introduced; I remember being told that the 116s could be deployed at 6d a mile for a 3 car set for fuel, coolant, and maintenance when they were introduced in the Cardiff Valleys in 1958; I imagine the GW sets cost more to run than that.  They saved on the cost of a fireman, as well; mind, the GW cars did that.  By my time, the 70s, this was a distant memory as fuel costs had increased considerably and availability was down; it was a struggle to keep them in service especially in the hot summer of 1976 when coolant issues were rife.

[The Johnster]

The development of steam railmotors on the GW was successful in that they generated traffic on routes where the railway was in competition with new suburban tramway routes, and were promptly victims of their own success because trailers had to be provided to cope with demand.  As the availability of the SRMs meant that the passenger accomodation was out of service at the same time as the engine unit, and a large number of redacted Victorian locomotives too small to be of much use for anything else such as Metros, 517s, 850s, and 2021s were available for more or less no cost, the obvious next stage was to fit these locos with the auto equipment necessary for use with the SRM trailers and get another 20 years of light use out of them, which meant that it was practical to use two trailers and/or haul tail traffic.  Eventually the SRMs were rebuilt as trailers for use with the auto fitted locomotives.

 

At around the time the last of the SRMs were converted to trailers, some of the older redacted auto-fitted locos were reaching the end of their lives, and were replaced by new-build 48xx and 54/64xx for auto work.  There is no reason that the successful 57xx class could not have been auto fitted, but it would have perhaps been considered that they were too powerful to waste in this way.  The play in the mechanical auto linkage limited the trains to no more than two trailers on each side of the locomotive, and it was also considered that a little more speed than a 57xx would have been comfortable with, and the 48xx and 54xx had 5'2" driving wheels. 

 

It was then thought that a version of the 54xx with smaller wheels would be useful for the hillier routes in South Wales and the 4-trailer Plymouth Area trains, and a 4'7" version, the 64xx, was introduced.  It is a little obscure as to why an auto-fitted 57xx was not used instead.

 

The final chapter of this story is the 'regular interval' timetable for the Cardiff Valleys in 1953, which extended auto working in South Wales considerably.  New trailers were converted from Collett suburban compartment stock, and a batch of 4575s given auto gear; again, the 57xx were bypassed.  There may have been a reason that they were out of favour for auto work, but if there was I have no idea what it was, or why other possibly suitable classes such as 45xx, 56xx, or 94xx were not used. 

 

Another unexplored possibility (to my mind, anyway) in the post war period, by which time the GW had amassed a good deal of experience with the diesel railcars, was to ask why auto trailers were not converted to diesel railcars for suburban work.  This could have been done with the engines and transmissions used in the earlier railcars in the late 40s and early 50s, and I cannot believe nobody ever thought of it.

 

 

Edited January 2, 2022 by The Johnster

[John Besley]

A pair of Auto trailers running as a DMU would make an interesting model - bit like a Budd rail car...