Imaginary Locomotives

[whart57]

4 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

and never, so far as I can see, on the Southern and LNER.

 

On the Southern making steam more efficient was a lower priority than replacing it altogether.

[The Johnster]

2 hours ago, Northmoor said:

There is no way any steam shunting locomotives should have been built by BR; all the Pannier tanks were a complete waste of resources; the EE 0-6-0DE has already successfully demonstrated itself by then.

But only a very small number of steam shunting locomotives were built by BR, the 15xx panniers, which in a wonderful piece of perversity typical of the period were most noted in ecs work out to Old Oak from Paddington, a duty they were unsuitable for while the Bristol Channel ports were crying out for them...  Of the others, the 94xx, 16xx, and the J72s, these were not simply shunting locomotives. The 94xx were the culmination of the GW's program of replacing pre-grouping non-standard locos, and there was a role for the 16xx and J72s, very similar in size and capability, that could not be conveniently undertaken by the EE 350hp shunting engines.

 

The 350s were peerless as yard shunters, and adequate as station pilots, but did not have the speed or ride to do anything much over about 15mph.  They were a pita over any sort of distance on main lines, simply getting in the way, and a bit long-winded on branch pickups.  Important to remember that it would have been very difficut to predict the massive loss of traffic to road haulage that was going to destroy branch and pickup work after about 1958 in the decade preceding, and the 1955 plan, post dating the 16xx and J72, provided far too many Type 1s that turned out to be ineffective for work that was going to dissappear before they were all built.  As luck had it, one type, the EE 1,000hp Bo-Bo, fell into the coal hauling role as double-headed nose to nose pairs, or they would have rapildy gone the way of their Type 1 brethren.

 

That so many steam locomotive were built in the 50s is regrettable as it turned out and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but they made sense at the time.  More sense than the D95xx, whose work had dissappeared before delayed construction started, to replace 94xx that were not needed after about 1952, some 1954 built examples lasting less that 5 years in service.

[Zomboid]

8 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

That so many steam locomotive were built in the 50s is regrettable as it turned out and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but they made sense at the time. 

I don't know, if that hadn't happened then we wouldn't have the large and successful heritage sector that we do now.

 

Which is not really much of a justification, I admit.

[AlfaZagato]

In a slightly sillier tone, how would 10800, or a class 15 or 16, look in ATSF 'Bookend' blue?  Or a BR approximation thereof?   I bet you couldn't make one for a geep at a glance.

[The Johnster]

No.  There is only one livery that would have suited the Brown-Bovery, ATSF Warbonnet.  Pennsy lined dark red might have worked as well. 

[Zomboid]

36 minutes ago, AlfaZagato said:

In a slightly sillier tone, how would 10800, or a class 15 or 16, look in ATSF 'Bookend' blue?  Or a BR approximation thereof?   I bet you couldn't make one for a geep at a glance.

They're very much high short hood locos. They'd look good in SP Black Widow, because that paint scheme looks good on everything.

[JimC]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

That so many steam locomotive were built in the 50s is regrettable as it turned out and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but they made sense at the time.  

Well probably, but to play devil's advocate, the services had to be run, and run as reliably and cheaply as possible. I wonder at what point the new locomotives stopped being cost effective over keeping the old crocks running? As it was there were a lot of locomotives well past their sell by date in 1945. The replacements certainly wouldn't need to run a full life to be cost effective.

Unless someone has done a really thorough analysis of cost per mile of different classes I submit its impossible to draw a line in the sand and say "these ones were a waste and those ones weren't". We can be pretty confident that earlier introduction of diesels would have been a bad thing, so the services did need to be run with steam engines of some kind. 

[DenysW]

I understand that the nice Dr. Beeching, in his brief sabbatical at British Railways, found that the company knew exactly what it charged for all of its services, but didn't have the data to attribute costs to them to know which ones ran at a profit. This debate feels like part of the exploration of that problem.

[AlfaZagato]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

No.  There is only one livery that would have suited the Brown-Bovery, ATSF Warbonnet.  Pennsy lined dark red might have worked as well. 

No, the DE that ran on the former LMS.   You're thinking 18000.  Though I will contend any turbine needs Armor Yellow at the end of the day.

[DK123GWR]

I have here a couple of questions which seem interesting, but I don't really have the knowlege to answer.

If we had managed to break out of 4 wheel unbraked wagons much earlier (let's say the 1920s or 1930s) what would have pulled them? The GWR built the 47xx (rated 7F by BR) for fast overnight freight - would that have been their go-to or perhaps something completely new? Could more garratts have been produced in the UK, or would the railways keep to conventional designs?

 

Another thought, entirely unrelated. The largest passenger tanks that I am aware of were class 4s such as the GWR Large Praries, BR's Standard 4MT and its LMS ancestors. What conditions might have made a larger passenger or mixed traffic tank loco useful? If there were a world where they were useful, could they be practically built?

[whart57]

16 minutes ago, DK123GWR said:

I have here a couple of questions which seem interesting, but I don't really have the knowlege to answer.

If we had managed to break out of 4 wheel unbraked wagons much earlier (let's say the 1920s or 1930s) what would have pulled them? The GWR built the 47xx (rated 7F by BR) for fast overnight freight - would that have been their go-to or perhaps something completely new? Could more garratts have been produced in the UK, or would the railways keep to conventional designs?

 

Another thought, entirely unrelated. The largest passenger tanks that I am aware of were class 4s such as the GWR Large Praries, BR's Standard 4MT and its LMS ancestors. What conditions might have made a larger passenger or mixed traffic tank loco useful? If there were a world where they were useful, could they be practically built?

 

Something like this?

 

 

These Netherlands Railways 63XX locos were primarily used on the Limburg coal traffic but were also pressed into passenger service on occasions. One example is in the Utrecht railway museum

[whart57]

I thought I'd check up on the locomotives imagined by Ashford Works in the early years of the last century, and in D L Bradley's "bible" found this copy of a works drawing for an 0-6-2T based on the Wainwright C

 

Hattons have some second hand Bachmanns ...............

[Zomboid]

2 hours ago, DK123GWR said:

I have here a couple of questions which seem interesting, but I don't really have the knowlege to answer.

If we had managed to break out of 4 wheel unbraked wagons much earlier (let's say the 1920s or 1930s) what would have pulled them? The GWR built the 47xx (rated 7F by BR) for fast overnight freight - would that have been their go-to or perhaps something completely new? Could more garratts have been produced in the UK, or would the railways keep to conventional designs?

It would most likely have been something different, as locos were designed to meet traffic needs.

 

If we'd had braked, bogie freight wagons as the standard by the 20s/ 30s, then I suppose the question is how would they have run? The super heavy stuff would still have been super heavy and in need of a lot of power to move at a highish speed, but you'd think that for most stuff the trains would have run more like passenger trains and at passenger speeds, so the locos were have looked more like passenger locos.

[AlfaZagato]

Even here in the US, where we have had bogie & braked freight since the 19th century, we still had distinct locomotives for freight service. 

 

I do imagine, given more advanced freight wagons in the UK, that the mixed-traffic types would have been built in even greater numbers.  More notably, we would have likely seen the end of the 0-6-0 type not long after introduction of bogie freight.   I'm happy to be corrected, but having neither pilot nor trailing wheels limits the theoretical speed of the type.

[Zomboid]

Wasn't the 2-8-2 the general utility loco over there?

 

Obviously there were special tools for particular jobs.

[JimC]

2 hours ago, DK123GWR said:

If we had managed to break out of 4 wheel unbraked wagons much earlier (let's say the 1920s or 1930s) what would have pulled them? The GWR built the 47xx (rated 7F by BR) for fast overnight freight - would that have been their go-to or perhaps something completely new? 

The GWRs 28s were very occasionally used for passenger trains if the need was severe enough, so they should have been well capable of faster timings, whilst the 47 is the obvious next step. They'd just have been able to scrap the RODs earlier, which would have led to few tears on the footplate

 

2 hours ago, DK123GWR said:

IThe largest passenger tanks that I am aware of were class 4s such as the GWR Large Praries, BR's Standard 4MT and its LMS ancestors. What conditions might have made a larger passenger or mixed traffic tank loco useful? If there were a world where they were useful, could they be practically built?

Weight is the issue. The GWR 3150s - the larger boiler Prairies - were getting towards the red route limit. My not-very-well-informed guess is that a Manor boiler on a 4-6-2T chassis is as large a six coupled tank engine as could be managed in the GWR weight limits. A Hall equivalent would need to be 8 coupled.

 

As for need, well an intensive suburban service perhaps. That enthusiastic Swindon trained imaginer of large locomotives, Dusty Durrant, worked up a study of a 2-10-2T to match Southern electric schedules  on 10 coach suburban trains, but it was well over the standard red route limit at 21T on the driving wheels.

[The Johnster]

In a 1920s onward all-bogie automatically braked freight scenario in the UK, the limiting factors would have been the axle loading and the train lengths.  60 standad 4 wheel wagons is the normal limit, imposed by the length of layby sidings, passing loops, signal overlaps and such, and where there were exceptions such as the 90 or 100 wagon coal trains for the London market, special signalling arrangements, guaranteed clear roads through the shorter sections, and double blocking were authorised in the Sectional Appendices.  A 5MT mixed  traffic 4-6-0 with driving wheels in the 6' radius ball park is a very useful tool for all but the heaviest traffic, and can be used for most other jobs as well.  So, more Halls, Black 5s, S15s, and B1s.  For heavier work, I would think that 2-8-0 versions with driving wheels around 5'-5'3" area would have been sufficient, possible with 3-cylinders.

 

Or more pacifics.  The ECML worked very heavy express fish trains at insane speeds with pacifics.

[Hroth]

6 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Or more pacifics.  The ECML worked very heavy express fish trains at insane speeds with pacifics.

 

Probably the engine crew trying to escape the smell...  Pity the poor guard!

 

[The Johnster]

They were allowed to marshall 2 vans behind the brake van to steady the ride; I suspect the guards were too concerned with hanging on for dear life to worry about the fish smell...

[AlfaZagato]

8 hours ago, Zomboid said:

Wasn't the 2-8-2 the general utility loco over there?

 

Obviously there were special tools for particular jobs.

Depends heavily on the line.   The Santa Fe, for example, built mostly, well, Santa Fe's, 2-10-4's, in significant quantities for freight hauling.   Tenders on the things were nearly as long as the loco.  The ATSF crossed some of the bleakest terrain in the US, though.

[whart57]

I presume that this is the inspiration for the "Flying Kipper" in the Awdry books

 

[whart57]

To come back to the SE&CR's 0-6-2T that never was, according to Bradley's book the need for a loco of this sort was raised at the Locomotive Committee. Bradley doesn't expand on the reasons but we can surmise two things. One is that the SE&CR had a lot of freight workings in the London area - including transfers over what is now the Thameslink connection - which were short in length and thus didn't need the coal and water capacity of a tender and, given the absence of turntables across much of the suburban network, involved a lot of tender-first running. The recollections of loco crews active back then was that running tender-first was very unpleasant, crews were bathed in gritty coal dust the whole time, so we can also surmise that the loco crews were complaining.

 

On the other hand management, including the CME Wainwright, felt these tank engines wouldn't be flexible enough as they couldn't suddenly be rostered for a Ramsgate goods.

 

Eventually management won the argument, though the plans got far enough to allocate a class description - N class - and reserve six numbers in the loco list.

 

So this Class C with presumably H class cab, tanks and bunker, is a might have been that nearly was.

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, whart57 said:

To come back to the SE&CR's 0-6-2T that never was,

 

Something along these lines has been done by @Sophia NSE although it's more a James Stirling SER type, being based on a Wrenn R1:

 

[whart57]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Something along these lines has been done by @Sophia NSE although it's more a James Stirling SER type, being based on a Wrenn R1:

 

 

Setting aside the inaccuracies of the Wrenn R1 - it does date from the 1950s after all being one of Hornby Dublos first forays into 2-rail - that loco class would have the right boiler and had the pagoda cab that the proposed 0-6-2T would presumably have had.

 

(One of the curiosities of 1950s/60s RTR is that the company based in Liverpool chose a small class of tank engines from the deep South for their basic 0-6-0T while the company who were based in the county where those locos actually operated chose something more Northern. OK, Midland, but to Kent that is "northern")

Edited November 25, 2021 by whart57

[Flying Pig]

Could the Hornby H body be used as a basis for the 0-6-2t?