Imaginary Locomotives

[PhilJ W]

16 minutes ago, 62613 said:

Although, we must recall that he decamped to France, just ahead of the old bill, in about 1965, so he was surely up to no good somewhere

Not so much the old bill but the Inland Revenue, he didn't pay all of his taxes.

[Rockalaucher101]

Made some quick snaps of my project late last night. Apologies for the phot quality.

Still very early on in the bashing phase, but should be ready for primer soon.

[PhilJ W]

This could be the future for all preserved steam if fossil fuels are banned.

[ScottishRailFanatic]

9 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

This could be the future for all preserved steam if fossil fuels are banned.

To quote Darth Vader, 'Noooooooo!'

[rodent279]

5 minutes ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

To quote Darth Vader, 'Noooooooo!'

Wasn't that Luke?

 

Darth would be an AC electric saying "I am you father!"

[Rockalaucher101]

6 minutes ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

To quote Darth Vader, 'Noooooooo!'

Agreed. I think people would rather mothball their loco's that convert them to overhead or 3rd rail.

 

I have another project on the go, an extended hymek on a Hornby deltic  chassis. Question is though is what have a crack at after?

[Rockalaucher101]

3 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

Wasn't that Luke?

 

Darth would be an AC electric saying "I am you father!"

End of Revenge of the Sith. But yes, also Luke in Empire Strikes Back

[Joseph_Pestell]

1 hour ago, Rockalaucher101 said:

 

 

I have another project on the go, an extended hymek on a Hornby deltic  chassis. Question is though is what have a crack at after?

 

Surely an extended Hymek needs to be on a Class 52 (hydraulic) chassis.

[Rockalaucher101]

2 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Surely an extended Hymek needs to be on a Class 52 (hydraulic) chassis.

Very true, it's just what I had at the time. Did Hornby ever release the 52 with anything other than a ringfield?

[ScottishRailFanatic]

10 minutes ago, Rockalaucher101 said:

Very true, it's just what I had at the time. Did Hornby ever release the 52 with anything other than a ringfield?

Not quite sure, although I remember seeing one at an exhibition with a different type a few years back.

 

Meanwhile, how about an 'air smoothed' Lord Nelson?

[Rockalaucher101]

10 minutes ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

Not quite sure, although I remember seeing one at an exhibition with a different type a few years back.

 

Meanwhile, how about an 'air smoothed' Lord Nelson?

Now that'd take some doin to build. Maybe if I find a spare/repair west country and lord nelson I'd consider it.

Cutting up models that are perfectly fine never sat well with me...

[ScottishRailFanatic]

LNER Lined Silver?

[Clive Mortimore]

4 hours ago, Rockalaucher101 said:

Agreed. I think people would rather mothball their loco's that convert them to overhead or 3rd rail.

 

I have another project on the go, an extended hymek on a Hornby deltic  chassis. Question is though is what have a crack at after?

I thought everyone had one.

 

[Compound2632]

Extended - with doubled logo? I'll raise you:

 

 

 

[melmerby]

22 hours ago, Flying Pig said:

 

I think the highlighted phrase is key, as it is clearly a major mod of the existing boiler retaining the original shell.  A purpose-built boiler wouldn't need either a firebox or a smokebox and would probably look very bland, quite like a fireless loco.  This would probably make a good cab-forward conversion, with no firing needed and everything electric.

I give you:

 

 

[Flying Pig]

45 minutes ago, melmerby said:

I give you:

 

 

 

 

Yes, that was posted a couple of pages or so back which is what prompted @Corbs to unearth his electro-9F.  I'm guessing it must be the only prototype example of electro-steam, as this isn't the first time it has graced this (admittedly quite lengthy) thread.  The Swiss obviously went back to sensible machines powered by falling weights and chocolate as soon as conditions allowed.

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, Flying Pig said:

 

 

Yes, that was posted a couple of pages or so back which is what prompted @Corbs to unearth his electro-9F.  I'm guessing it must be the only prototype example of electro-steam, as this isn't the first time it has graced this (admittedly quite lengthy) thread.  The Swiss obviously went back to sensible machines powered by falling weights and chocolate as soon as conditions allowed.

IIRC it started out as a coal fired loco and due to coal shortage(?) they put a kettle (sic) element into the boiler.

I have posted it before, a long way back, if not in this topic, in another.

[Flying Pig]

14 minutes ago, melmerby said:

IIRC it started out as a coal fired loco and due to coal shortage(?) they put a kettle (sic) element into the boiler.

I have posted it before, a long way back, if not in this topic, in another.

 

That's certainly the story told here: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/swisselec/swisselc.htm

[AlfaZagato]

I'm surprised www.douglas-self.com isn't mentioned here more often.

[Gibbo675]

On 07/03/2021 at 16:23, The Johnster said:

 

I'm old enough to remember the arguments put forward in the early 60s in favour of dieselisation as rapidly as possible as a necessary replacement of steam.  It was reckoned, though I cannot confirm it to be a fact, that the cost of building a diesel loco was 3 times that of a steam loco of similar general capacity (our 47/Castle comparison is valid here), but that the increased availability of diesel traction enabled 3 steam locos to be replaced by each roughly equivalent diesel.  A statement often heard was that a steam locomotive takes about 8 hours to raise steam from cold, while the diesel only needs a 20 minute walk around and checkover by the driver and once brake pressure has been created you're good to go.

 

This ignores that most steam locos are kept in light steam most of the time and can be brought up to working pressure in less than 2 hours, still not anything like as fast as the diesel, but the diesel needs to be fuelled, coolant topped up, and checked over by the running shed fitters, which evens the playing field a bit.  Steam locos are kept in steam because it is  advantageous not only for availability but also reduces wear on components subject to expansion and contraction, particularly where hot water and steam comes into contact with steel plates and tubes.  Steam locos have to be completely cooled down and the boiler emptied at regular intervals, about every 10 working days for big tender locos, called a boiler washout.  YouTube has a BTC film called 'Wash And Brush Up' which illustrates the procedure on a standard 5MT at Patricroft; it takes two days, and as well as the boiler tube cleaning a going over by the boilersmith and any other jobs that need doing are done at the same time.  It is the laying of a new fire and bringing to pressure, which must be done slowly in order to mimimise damage from expansion, that takes 8 hours.

 

The exchange rate, 3 withdrawn steam for each new diesel at each shed, proved nearly to be the undoing of the WR timetable in 1962.  Because the Warships had been specified with insufficient power to replace Castles in good order, and were doing King work on the Bristolian and West of England routes, they were thrashed by the drivers to keep time.  This was easy enough; you just put her into forward and opened her up all the way.  The result was mechanical unreliablity and down time, and Warships blocking bays in the erecting shop at Swindon which impacted on the building of new Westerns.  A similar thing happened on the South Wales route with the Hymeks, pocket rockets but not up to 14 bogies from Severn Tunnel Bottom to Badminton at King timings.  The Kings were concentrated on the Wolverhamptons to proved a 2 hour service from Birmingham while the wires were being put up on the Euston route, and were dropping like flies with cracked frames; it wasn't just the Warships that were being thrashed.

 

The driving force behind this was the region's desire to beat the ER and be the first region to eliminate steam, which they managed in 1965, but by then the hydraulic program was in ruins.  It was the ER that effectively bailed us out, partly with the arrival of Gerard Fiennes as GM.  He had seen the advantages of the 37s and 47s and, with EE and Brush being in a position to accept the orders, the next batch of Hymeks, D7101-99, lower geared for South Wales mineral work to replace the 56xx and 42xx, were cancelled in favour of 37s, and Westerns and the proposed 'Super Western' were cancelled in favour of 47s.  The 47s suffered a bit with thrashing on the South Wales route and had to be derated, but that gave the region breathing space for 1963; the Warships were brought into line, trouble with the hydraulics on them and the Westerns was overcome, and from then the hydraulics began to give reliable service, but only for the next decade or so, as the lack of space for train air brake equipment in the case of the 22s, Warships, and Hymeks, and ETH in the case of the Westerns condemned them as incapable of being brought into line with the required standards.  Should they have been built in the first place, since air brakes and ETH had been on the 1955 shopping list?  Possibly, but not in that minimal space form, a result of a desire for good power/weight ratios.  This has been discussed to death many times.

 

But in '62 and early '63 the WR timetable came very close to collapse because there were simply not enough serviceable locos to run the trains.  This parlous state of affairs should have been avoided by the exchange rate being reduced to 2 steam for each diesl, or even 2 and a half, but politics prevented this.  Timetable improvents which were designed to re-inforce the perception that diesel was better than steam in operation (it wasn't, not until the HSTs were introduced) were actually brought about by a combination of junction relayings (Severn Tunnel, Patchway, Stoke Gifford, Wootton Bassett) and reducing loads; the South Wales trains went down from 14 without assistance to 12, then 10 with airco and 47s. 

 

Looked at purely and only as a matter of bums on seats, a Traffic Dept. perspective, you can carry the same number of people pre hour between Cardiff General and Paddington in 1956 with a Brit or a Castle and up to 16 coaches assisted STJ-Badminton as you can with a HST service in 1976; the HST service is better 'only' because it has more frequent departures and a shorter journey time.  The higher speed enables more trains to occupy the same route, an advantage to the Operating Dept, and Marketing like them as well, but in terms of bums on seats there's not much difference.  Even now, when the electrics have restored the 1970s HST timings, there's not that much difference in bums on seats.

 

Of course, diesels are better than steam from anything except an aesthetic enthusiast viewpoint, but the first and second generations of them were not much faster or more powerful, and they were not as superior as was claimed in other respects as well.  In those days, the railway was greatly  concerned with 'modernisation'; fair enough, but a more holistic approach, while delaying the elimination of steam by maybe 3 or 4 years, would have given it a much smoother ride and caused fewer operating and maintenance problems. 

 

My view was (still is but now it's an academic irrelevance) that Riddles' original approach, approved by the BTC, was correct; electrification of trunk routes and dieselisation of secondary routes by the early 70s leading to the elimination of steam by around that time.  This happened on mainland Europe, both sides of the Iron Curtain, but when the Treasury realised how much it would cost a re-organisation from BTC to BRB instigated what was effectively a coup which ousted Riddles and his team.  What followed, so quickly that it might be suspected of being pre-arranged, was the 1955 MP, which had some very good ideas; air brakes, airco, bogie freight stock, electric heating, CWR, MAS, but whose locomotive policy, based on faulty information from Rugby, was hopelessly flawed.

 

Then. less than a decade later, Beeching.  He was not the monster some of us think he was, a lot of the railway was unsustainable in it's pre-Beeching form and a tree needs to be pruned for it's own good sometimes, but Beeching did things from a beancounter pov (inevitable given that his task was to control losses on the railway) and if you cut the branches without holistically looking at what will happen to the trunk, the trunk starts to die, not to benefit from the pruning.  How much money was saved by the wholesale and indiscriminate closure of small main line stations and goods yards?  The line had to be maintained and the overheads paid for anyway.  Sure, they were overstaffed, but that could have been rectified; dmu locals with on board ticket sales, and the odd mileage siding retained, would have been of huge and reasonably cost effective value to many rural communities which had intercity and block freight trains blasting through them at high speeds but gained no benefit from them.

 

And that's my Sunday afternoon in the middle of lockdown ramblngs for this week...

Hi Johnster,

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again, when are you going to write a book ?

 

I feel that it would be worth the read !

 

Gibbo.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Gibbo675
Spelling

[The Johnster]

Haven't got time to write a book. Gibbo; between maintaining a presence here, messing about with the layout, and shopping for, cooking, and eating food and keeping the squalor at bay in the flat.  And to be honest I'm not that knowledgeable about any specific subject to manage a whole book!

 

I enjoy writing, though, and was one of those odd characters at school who actually liked essays, and planning the points or arguments then structuring it all into what I reckoned was a readable form.  RMWeb and the odd moan to the BBC are enough for me. though.  If anyone enjoys reading my nonsense, that is a bonus!

 

I have an inordinate fondness of semicolons; they make the scan more conversational and intimate IMHO.  Very few of my posts don't have one somewhere, and this is not deliberate, I just find them very useful...

[Gibbo675]

6 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Haven't got time to write a book. Gibbo; between maintaining a presence here, messing about with the layout, and shopping for, cooking, and eating food and keeping the squalor at bay in the flat.  And to be honest I'm not that knowledgeable about any specific subject to manage a whole book!

 

I enjoy writing, though, and was one of those odd characters at school who actually liked essays, and planning the points or arguments then structuring it all into what I reckoned was a readable form.  RMWeb and the odd moan to the BBC are enough for me. though.  If anyone enjoys reading my nonsense, that is a bonus!

 

I have an inordinate fondness of semicolons; they make the scan more conversational and intimate IMHO.  Very few of my posts don't have one somewhere, and this is not deliberate, I just find them very useful...

Hi Johnster,

 

I appreciate your ramblings and I'm sure others do also; with or without semi colons !

 

Gibbo.

[Rockalaucher101]

16 hours ago, Clive Mortimore said:

I thought everyone had one.

 

Apparently so... Although I'm aiming for 2 tone green once it's ready for paint.

[Clive Mortimore]

1 hour ago, Rockalaucher101 said:

Apparently so... Although I'm aiming for 2 tone green once it's ready for paint.

Ah, painting ones models.

 

If you pop over to my Sheff Ex thread you will see it is something I need to relearn.

[Rockalaucher101]

45 minutes ago, Clive Mortimore said:

Ah, painting ones models.

 

If you pop over to my Sheff Ex thread you will see it is something I need to relearn.

Not spotting anything that jumps out as bad. Unless you got any particular examples, things look good to me.

Or are you referring to the coaches that are yet to be painted? Because I think we're all guilty of that. Still got an LNER coronation twin that I bashed together that's not even in primer yet, no underframes neither