Imaginary Locomotives

[brack]

31 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

Dobroe, tovarisch! Spasiba bolshoye!  I’ve never seen a video of this semi-mythical beast, so here we are! http://cs.trains.com/ctr/f/3/t/272436.aspx

It looks even more huge when moving. What's up with the piston rods though? Looks like they're about 8 foot long, did they make the connecting rods too short, or trying to keep reciprocating masses smaller?

 

 

The valve gear seems to be driven off the 5th driver as well?

 

Weird...

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

4 hours ago, rockershovel said:

the 2-8-2 and 2-8-4 types with mechanical stokers, cast steel frames, 40-ton axle loading etc 

 

no need for a 40 ton axle load, the SAR class 24 (North British Locomotives) was a dainty 11 tons for 27,600lbs TE...  a Standard 5 was 19 tons for 26,120lbs.

 

 

UK domestic locomotive design was in the doldrums from the 30s onwards, I don't know why.  Utter conservatism on the part of the railway companies I assume.

 

 

[melmerby]

50 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

Dobroe, tovarisch! Spasiba bolshoye!  I’ve never seen a video of this semi-mythical beast, so here we are! http://cs.trains.com/ctr/f/3/t/272436.aspx

If I've got the gist of the captions right it looks like it was capable of moving a 2800t load at 60/70kmh

[rockershovel]

4 minutes ago, melmerby said:

If I've got the gist of the captions right it looks like it was capable of moving a 2800t load at 60/70kmh

 

Presumably, anywhere with no pointwork.......

[brack]

11 tons, ridiculous. The 'big' sierra leone garratts (2'6" gauge) put out 23000lbs te on an axle load of 5 tons.

The private builders were turning out far better stuff than the big railway companies for years. I imagine it's because they were less parochial and insular, had more influence/cross fertilisation from abroad, plus if you're churning out designs at a greater rate you ought to be learning from your mistakes or evolving them more rapidly.

 

Even those times our railways did innovate it was often when they were looking and talking to those further afield.

The classic british mixed traffic 460 first appeared on the Highland, but the Jones goods was based on a design for india.

Gresley described the SAR 19D as one of the best steam loco designs in the world, but didnt choose to build a branch line 4-8-2. 

We all know that Gresley's pacifics were modelled off the K4, and some of the more forward thinking pregrouping lines had sent people off to look at lines in the US.

Churchwards principles were influenced by what he saw abroad.

[Gibbo675]

13 minutes ago, brack said:

11 tons, ridiculous. The 'big' sierra leone garratts (2'6" gauge) put out 23000lbs te on an axle load of 5 tons.

The private builders were turning out far better stuff than the big railway companies for years. I imagine it's because they were less parochial and insular, had more influence/cross fertilisation from abroad, plus if you're churning out designs at a greater rate you ought to be learning from your mistakes or evolving them more rapidly.

 

Even those times our railways did innovate it was often when they were looking and talking to those further afield.

The classic british mixed traffic 460 first appeared on the Highland, but the Jones goods was based on a design for india.

Gresley described the SAR 19D as one of the best steam loco designs in the world, but didnt choose to build a branch line 4-8-2. 

We all know that Gresley's pacifics were modelled off the K4, and some of the more forward thinking pregrouping lines had sent people off to look at lines in the US.

Churchwards principles were influenced by what he saw abroad.

Hi Brack,

 

You are quite right in saying that the private builders were constructing locomotives bye far and away superior to any home produced locomotive in a railway company workshop regardless of company, especially including British Railways at the time of their construction in the 1950's.

 

If you consider what was built at Vulcan Foundry and North British and compare it to what ran past the works on a daily basis it is quite risible.

 

Gibbo.

[rockershovel]

I assume that this was because the British, and South African definitions of “branch line” were quite different. 

 

Didn’t the Union Pacific 4-12-2 have Gresley conjugated valve gear? 

[rockershovel]

3 minutes ago, Gibbo675 said:

Hi Brack,

 

You are quite right in saying that the private builders were constructing locomotives bye far and away superior to any home produced locomotive in a railway company workshop regardless of company, especially including British Railways at the time of their construction in the 1950's.

 

If you consider what was built at Vulcan Foundry and North British and compare it to what ran past the works on a daily basis it is quite risible.

 

Gibbo.

 

This would be the forward-looking company which completely failed to cope with the transition to diesel and electric traction? 

[The Johnster]

I think that it's not unfair to say that Railway Company loco design in the UK following the Great War was very small c conservative.  There are IMHO several reasons for this, and your point about learning from previous designs at a faster rate if you are an outside builder is valid, but the Railway Company designs were constrained in several ways.  Post 1923, the competition for CME posts was far fiercer, and nobody wanted to make a mistake, to the extent that when the LMS went to outside builders for the Royal Scots and Beyer Garratts, it hobbled them by insisting on it's own axleboxes.  The Golden Rule seems to have been 'if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it' even when fixing it was needed!  Moreover, the Railway Companies were designing specifically for their own needs, and all seemed adept at convincing themselves that they were doing well enough (especially the GW) when they could have been doing better.  

 

And in many ways they weren't doing that badly.  The records for speed, longest distance run, and fastest timetabled train were all held by British Railway Companies in the 30s.  There was far too much sitting on laurels, though, and if you are sitting on your laurels you are definitely wearing them in the wrong place.

 

The outside contractors, in contrast, had to build to specific requirements from their overseas customers, and thus had to be perhaps a bit more adaptive and free thinking.  They had to satisfy requirements for numerous track and loading gauges, differing fuels and operating conditions, and widely differing axle loads at the same time as standardising the product to the greatest possible extent.  Some of them, notably but not uniquely Beyer Garratt, had considerable experience in building locos for export far more powerful than anything needed here.

[The Johnster]

6 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

This would be the forward-looking company which completely failed to cope with the transition to diesel and electric traction? 

Yes; we are I think discussing steam production here.  To be fair to them, very few steam loco manufacturers did particularly well in transitioning to diesel or electric traction, and the US companies were largely put of of business by it as well as ours.  Brush and EE did well out of it, though.

[rockershovel]

3 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Yes; we are I think discussing steam production here.  To be fair to them, very few steam loco manufacturers did particularly well in transitioning to diesel or electric traction, and the US companies were largely put of of business by it as well as ours.  Brush and EE did well out of it, though.

 

Baldwin completely failed to make the transition, but EMD are still in business (owned by Caterpillar) and Alco were on the right lines but were a casualty of centralised planning during WW2

[brack]

20 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

This would be the forward-looking company which completely failed to cope with the transition to diesel and electric traction? 

Very few of the big steam builders successfully made that transition. There was a huge amount of steam locos ordered from 1945 to 1955 as lines everywhere caught up on replacements or spent war reparation payments. The works were all full. Then almost at a stroke the orders dried up as railways suddenly shifted to diesel but also as their traffic base declined hugely with the increase in cars, lorries and air travel.

NBL should've had the transition in the bag as they'd sorted out some licensing deals, but they didnt have the capital to reequip the works, so ended up trying to make diesels designed in metric measurements with 50 or 60 year old imperial lathes. If Baldwin and alco couldnt make the transition and maintain market share, I'm not sure you can blame NBL or beyer peacock. Their late steam output was excellent though, and Beyer, Peacock's workmanship was still held in high esteem up until the doors shut.

[Gibbo675]

21 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

This would be the forward-looking company which completely failed to cope with the transition to diesel and electric traction? 

My dear Mr Shovel,

 

It would seem that you have somewhat perverted the course of the argument into the production techniques associated with the construction of diesel locomotives rather than continuing the context of the discussion about steam locomotives.

 

However,, now that you mention diesels I take it that you mean that, rather a lot of most successful diesel locomotives were indeed built at the Vulcan Foundry, Newton le Willow's, for both domestic and export use.

 

Gibbo

[brack]

I see johnster has posted a similar response whilst I was writing.

 

EMD and EE made a success simply because they didnt have to accommodate building steam locos at the same time, or worry about marketing one type vs another and cannabalising their own sales (remember for a steam loco most of it was built in house, whilst for many  established builders a diesel loco involved buying in engines, electrical gear etc, so presumably a smaller percentage profit to the builder unless they could bring those in house).

[rodent279]

6 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

The Gresley 2-8-2 showed that it was possible to construct freight locomotives that exceeded the network’s ability to utilise them.

Wasn't the Gresley 2-8-2 defeated as much as anything by the colliery's rigid adherence to small, non-fitted coal wagons?

Edited August 18, 2019 by rodent279

[melmerby]

53 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

Wasn't the Gresley 2-8-2 defeated as much as anything by the colliery's rigid adherence to small, non-fitted coal wagons?

And a lack of loops on the network capable of containing the theoretical load.

[john new]

1 hour ago, rodent279 said:

Wasn't the Gresley 2-8-2 defeated as much as anything by the colliery's rigid adherence to small, non-fitted coal wagons?

My recollection is that it could haul trains too long for the loops so however good the locomotive's design (and it was) it was proven in practice to be unsuitable for the purpose the operating side required. Unsuitable, obviously a subjective comment, but too big and over powered compared to the existing alternatives so the design not replicated in volume production.

 

Whilst undoubtedly true that the UK held on to old-style coal wagons for a long-time the alternative would have required massive capital investment by the collieries in new wagon fleets (a) they didn't need and (b) were not what the traffic warranted. For most collieries the demand they were supplying was small loads delivered to a nationwide network of individual coal merchants. 

 

Edited August 18, 2019 by john new

[The Johnster]

Merchant's traffic, household coal, and industrial supply to factories, mills, and workshops probably needed the small wagons, but the later 'House Coal Concentration' scheme was able to use 21t hoppers.  But many of the larger collieries were tied in to supplying large consumers in bulk, such as steelworks, and the export trade from the ports, and this traffic could and should have been carried in larger wagons with automatic brakes much earlier.

 

The collieries in pre-NCB days were very much rooted in the speculative enterprise culture that generated them in the first place, and were congenitally unwilling to spend money on pits that might hit geological problems or work out at an unforeseen time not very far into the future.  Collectively, they were the railways' biggest customer by a long chalk, and carried a good bit of clout despite the efforts of the likes of Felix Pole; coal was still being trundled around at 25mph in my day on the railway in the 70s with wagons that would not have aroused much comment from George Stephenson ('howay, bonny lad, they're steel, that'll cause even more embarrassment for the coo!).   The NCB introduced centralised planning and a culture less competitive between individual pits, which probably gave most of them another 30 years of existence!

[Zomboid]

2 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

Baldwin completely failed to make the transition, but EMD are still in business (owned by Caterpillar) and Alco were on the right lines but were a casualty of centralised planning during WW2

EMD built zero steam locomotives though.

Alco had a decent go, but didn't recover after their electrical equipment supplier (GE) decided to go it alone.

[Allegheny1600]

2 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

This would be the forward-looking company which completely failed to cope with the transition to diesel and electric traction? 

Surely, that's as much about lack of (British) government support as anything?

 

2 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

Baldwin completely failed to make the transition, but EMD are still in business (owned by Caterpillar) and Alco were on the right lines but were a casualty of centralised planning during WW2

I'd say ALL the steam builders in the USA were casualties of the centralised war planning, of which, Alco were the most successful but the ex-steam builders all built quantities of diesel locos, many of which were highly regarded for "slugging it out" (due to decent GE electrical gear). I've read reports of engineers preferring almost anything to an EMD on some roads, due to them being slow off the mark and not having much grunt.

Indeed, many Baldwins still survive to this day, surely a testament to their build quality? Similarly with many of the other "minority" diesel builders.

As I'm sure you know, EMD never had to transition from building steam AND were given the green light to keep building diesels throughout WW2 - talk about a helping hand from Uncle Sam.

[AlfaZagato]

EMD was also building 679's for the Navy, so loco production was a convenient afterthought for them during WW2.   

[rockershovel]

Indian motocycles (note spelling) seem to have done badly out of WW2, while Harley Davidson prospered. 

[rockershovel]

On 18/08/2019 at 14:49, brack said:

I see johnster has posted a similar response whilst I was writing.

 

EMD and EE made a success simply because they didnt have to accommodate building steam locos at the same time, or worry about marketing one type vs another and cannabalising their own sales (remember for a steam loco most of it was built in house, whilst for many  established builders a diesel loco involved buying in engines, electrical gear etc, so presumably a smaller percentage profit to the builder unless they could bring those in house).

 

I seem to remember that North British tried building Diesel engines under licence, without success? 

[brack]

8 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 

I seem to remember that North British tried building Diesel engines under licence, without success? 

I mentioned that on the previous page. Essentially they tried making them with ancient machinery and poor control over tolerances. It didnt work so well.

[Zomboid]

Weren't they building MAN (German) designs?

 

They'd probably have fared better building American designs. For one thing they would have been Imperial rather than metric, and tolerances might have been a bit greater.

 

Wonder what a Fairbanks-Morse engined NBL Type 2 would have been like...