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Imaginary Locomotives


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Yes- there are definite similarities. Also a resemblance to the Gloucester C&W works carriages for the Severn & Wye & Severn Bridge railway, which had a saloon with a verandah at each end. I built this one mainly to use up the bits left over after building a 4 compartment luggage 3rd.

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Never expected such a detailed set of responses! Thanks all. Also, my mistake on Bug’s wheel arrangement, thanks for the correction.

 

The Egyptian loco is certainly a bit flashy to say the least, and the Hawthorn-style one looks very convincing. As has already been said, good to see the Prototype for Everything department is still in service! Particularly love the William Bridges Adams style loco, looks excellent; valve arrangement is giving off Crampton vibes to me.

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I was looking for the photograph of the 1849 Eastern Counties Railway 2-2-2 inspection locomotive. I couldn't find it but I came across this similar machine.

image.png.67a607171461a2d16aa6fee0867baabe.png

The ECR one was a lot shorter with only one compartment and was a 2-2-2. It was also low slung like the above illustration and the locomotive portion is almost identical.

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I think the Eastern Counties 2-2-2 was the Eagle. There's quite a bit about it here:

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/cambridge/index1.shtml

 

Even smaller than Gazelle, I think. I'm sure I remember somewhere that it was so small that it ended its days reduced to a 2-2-0 with the boiler removed and some sort of man powered pedal arrangement but I'm probably wrong. 

Eastern Counties Railway Eagle.jpg

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4 minutes ago, Johnson044 said:

I think the Eastern Counties 2-2-2 was the Eagle. There's quite a bit about it here:

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/cambridge/index1.shtml

 

Even smaller than Gazelle, I think. I'm sure I remember somewhere that it was so small that it ended its days reduced to a 2-2-0 with the boiler removed and some sort of man powered pedal arrangement but I'm probably wrong. 

Eastern Counties Railway Eagle.jpg

Thanks, thats the one I was looking for. The drivers were only 4' 6" to give you an idea of how small it was.

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38 minutes ago, ScottishRailFanatic said:

Veering away from tiny loco/saloon Frankensteins, what if the GWR built a 4-6-0T in similar vein to the 41xx?

E10620F5-023F-4300-8EF6-0DF86CC0B622.png

Nice but I think the crew might not appreciate having to climb over the splashers.  With wheels at least 6" smaller it could work though.

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I think you'd have to reduce the driving wheel diameter by a bit more than 6" to make this work.  The Star/Castle drivers are 6'8" diameter, and as shown the central driving axle runs through the lower part of the firebox, so would need to be dropped below that; this would mean 4'7" or possibly 4'1" driving wheels.  The cylinders need to be moved forward between the bogie wheels to align with the steam pipes, which may result in clearance issues with the front bogie wheels unless the bogie pivot is moved forward to sit directly beneath the chimney, which would need a frame extension of about 2 feet to the front of the loco. 

 

It might be better as a lightweight version of the 42xx, a heavy freight loco for blue and possibly yellow routes.

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13 hours ago, Johnson044 said:

I think the Eastern Counties 2-2-2 was the Eagle. There's quite a bit about it here:

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/cambridge/index1.shtml

 

Even smaller than Gazelle, I think. I'm sure I remember somewhere that it was so small that it ended its days reduced to a 2-2-0 with the boiler removed and some sort of man powered pedal arrangement but I'm probably wrong. 

Eastern Counties Railway Eagle.jpg

I do like the suggestion that it appears to be a prop from The Munsters. 

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The GWR were a prolific user of tank engines. At various times they built or operated 0-4-0, 0-4-2, 4-4-2, 0-6-0, 0-6-2, 2-6-2, 2-8-0 and 2-8-2 types. They certainly understood the advantages and disadvantages of tank versions of existing tender designs, and possessed a full knowledge of leading bogies. I don't doubt that if a 4-6-0T had been of any practical use, they would have built one. 4-6-0T don't seem to have been a common design anywhere. 

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15 hours ago, Johnson044 said:

I think the Eastern Counties 2-2-2 was the Eagle. There's quite a bit about it here:

 

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/c/cambridge/index1.shtml

 

Even smaller than Gazelle, I think. I'm sure I remember somewhere that it was so small that it ended its days reduced to a 2-2-0 with the boiler removed and some sort of man powered pedal arrangement but I'm probably wrong. 

Eastern Counties Railway Eagle.jpg

 

What strikes me is that the Personages get a cozy compartment to protect them from the elements, but the driver and fireman don't even get a spectacle plate, let alone a roof!

 

Its character-forming for the lower elements, I suppose...

 

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2 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

What strikes me is that the Personages get a cozy compartment to protect them from the elements, but the driver and fireman don't even get a spectacle plate, let alone a roof!

 

Its character-forming for the lower elements, I suppose...

 

It's 1849, very few locomotives had any sort of protection for the footplatemen. As an aside it would be easier for them to 'bail out' in the case of an accident. 

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5 hours ago, rockershovel said:

4-6-0T don't seem to have been a common design anywhere.

 

The Noth Eastern Class W1 was rapidly rebuilt as a pacific (LNER A6) and the Prussian T10, which looks a lot like @ScottishRailFanatic's image, doesn't seem to have been a great success.

 

Perhaps more effective on narrower gauges?  The War Department had a lot in WW1 of course and the Reseau Breton used a few of them on the metre gauge.  Were there any on the Irish 3 foot lines?

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17 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

It's 1849, very few locomotives had any sort of protection for the footplatemen. As an aside it would be easier for them to 'bail out' in the case of an accident. 

 

Surely "bailing out" would be considered unmanly and that they would be expected to stick to their posts no matter what.  A course of action made famous in 1852 as the "Birkenhead Drill".

 

Eagle seems to have been a lethal contraption, it ran down and killed the  Norwich District Superintendent in 1850...

 

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5 hours ago, rockershovel said:

 I don't doubt that if a 4-6-0T had been of any practical use, they would have built one. 4-6-0T don't seem to have been a common design anywhere. 

Certainly specialist. I suppose one usage for a 460T would have been a large 4 cylinder tank engine. I think the inside cylinders have to drive on the leading wheels, because there isn't really enough room under the boiler for cylinders angled to clear the leading axle with the connecting rod. 
The other major problem is the firebox. On the 2-8-0T the box is between the 2nd and 3rd drivers, with the third pair under the shallow part of the grate, and the last pair under the cab. The Stars and Saints have the firebox similarly positioned vis a vis the 2nd and third drivers, so it is possible. That would lead one to a 4-6-0T with the box between 1st and 2nd drivers. That layout works, but the boiler barrel would have to be astonishingly short, so we can abandon that.
So the next possibility is to lengthen the fixed wheelbase, so the bogie and first two pairs of driving wheels are in the same relationship to the boiler as on a Star, but the trailing wheels are set back to take up the weight of the bunker. The weight and wheelbase would be a challenge, but if the bunker were restricted to coal only instead of having the usual water tank underneath it could be made to work.  Water capacity starts being a problem though, so what we have is a very powerful and fast but short range tank engine. Yes, certainly specialist.

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To give a bit more idea of what I mean, here is a sketch of a 42 and  Castle undressed as it were, with just the cylinders wheels and boiler, so that it makes the relationship of the parts a bit clearer.  Looking at the actual sketches, I think you probably could draw a 4-6-0T with a slightly modified Std 4 boiler, and a fair bit of adjustment to the wheelbase, but I think it would be more than a little optimistic to expect a Std 4 boiler to feed 4 cylinders at express speeds.  Still, what's the point of the topic if not to think up and discuss impractical ideas? I've just had a fun hour considering how a 4-6-0T might be done, so thanks for that:-)
 

gwlayout.jpg.0cf0e870005bc56126a77a96e0aed8d7.jpg

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2 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

It's 1849, very few locomotives had any sort of protection for the footplatemen. As an aside it would be easier for them to 'bail out' in the case of an accident. 

On the GW, the loco crews objected to cabs being provided because they restriced forward visibility, a thing repeated in Churchward's time when he tried a Great Eastern type cab on a County 4-4-0.  Back in the 1850s, it was common for drivers to leave the cab to go around the loco oiling while in motion at speed, and the GW's Iron Dukes and Rovers had handrails to enable this to be done safely; the cabs made it a bit more awkward. 

 

One of the bad accidents on the Settle and Carlisle, Hawes Jc, or Ais Gill can't off hand remember which, involved a driver possibly overruning signals because he had left the cab to oil around, a practice not required at that time but clearly old habits died hard. 

 

As for bailing out, Victorian conceptions of manliness, and the Birkenhead drill, there are stories of drivers pushing young firemen off the loco and then staying at their posts to do whatever they could to slow the train and lessen the impact.  John Axon, an Edgeley man who stayed at his post on a runaway 8F hauled freight from Capel-en-le-Frith in the 1950s and was posthumously awarded a GC, pushed his fireman off the loco in this way.  By the 70s when I was a freight guard at Canton, the general agreement was that you told your secondman to hide in the engine room, and did not join him until you were certain that you had done all that was possible to prevent or mitigate the impact; in many cases there was no time to take this action.  On the brake van, you were expected to stay at your post in order to protect the train in rear with detonators, and my view was that you were likely to be seriously injured if you abandoned ship at anything more than about 25mph anyway, no matter how well you had tucked and rolled.  By the time you were aware that you were running away, you were already going much faster than that.

 

George Tarr, one of my regular drivers and a great bloke, was driving a train of 45ton vacuum braked tanks up from Carmarthen Jc which suffered a broken axle on one of the tanks between Carmarthen Jc and Llansteffan Crossing; the train derailed when it encountered the turnouts at Llansteffan.  Speed was about 50mph.  The guard was riding in the back cab and had already taken shelter in the engine room of the 47, and George ordered his secondman in there as well.  The loco went over on it's left hand side and George, with the rest of the traincrew trapped but safe in the engine room (the front engine room door was distorted and jammed, and the rear cab buried in tanks and spilled heavy fuel oil), and with a broken leg, dragged himself out of the cab and towards Ferryside to flag down the down Paddington-Carmarthen papers, which had signals cleared for it.  Not surprisingly he passed out from the pain and was found some time later with the leg fracture compounded considerably, but the driver on the papers had seen his red Bardic and pulled up in good time.  The box was not manned at that time of night.

 

This was genuine full on classic Victorian derring do heroism, and he was in hospital for a good time afterwards, but made a full recovery and returned to work.  It was generally reckoned to be safer to stay with the ship, but you were required to show that you'd done everything and not abandoned the controls for the engine room until there was no alternative.  Loco crews felt safer on locos with noses like 37s than on flat front locos, though my view was that in any accident over about 30mph a nose wouldn't protect you much and in fact would simply shove equipment into the cab spac; they certainly missed the protection of a solidly built boiler between them and the accident, though.  Most fatalities on steam locos in bad accidents are caused by the failure of the tender front plate, resulting in an avalanche of coal that pins the crew to the firebox and death is from a combination of crush injuries and scalding; if there was time, most crews preferred to be outside the cab on the steps at the moment of impact...

 

 

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Crew safety is why American diesels redeveloped the broad nose common on modern hood units.  I believe it was either CP or ATSF that first started employing what were called 'Comfort Cabs' in the 1970's.  These updated cabs were broadly devoid of heavy equipment, and engineered along the lines of automotive crumple zones.    My understanding is that such cabs have proven relatively effective.   Federally required at this point, too.

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23 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

I think that 4-6-0T would be interesting (and maybe more practical) as a 4-4-2T or even a 4-4-4T.

Indeed, but Churchward was there first!  That's a Std 2 boiler, which is the same length as a Std 4 but smaller diameter. 

GWR_County_tank_class_2221_(Howden,_Boys

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1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

Back in the 1850s, it was common for drivers to leave the cab to go around the loco oiling while in motion at speed, and the GW's Iron Dukes and Rovers had handrails to enable this to be done safely; 

 

The meaning of the word "safely" was obviously different then.

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