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The Night Mail


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Well, I was pleasantly surprised by the  final score line in the Wales v England Rugby match this afternoon.

 

I had expected England to run riot and amass a large number of tries against the Welsh, so I found it heartening to see that it ended up as 'Death by Penalty' which harks back to the glory days of Jonny Wilkinson, rather than being put through the grinder with try after try being conceded.

 

Sam Underhill's award of man of the match was well deserved.

 

The crisps got eaten but their appearance in the kitchen prompted a ban on my making Welsh cakes.  I never knew that too much of good things made you fat(ter).  however, cider was consumed and no Penderyn was harmed during the period of the match.

 

 

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I thought this was interesting, some very old home movie film by a wealthy Pennsylvania rope making proprietor, Norvin Rinek. I only know of him as he is mentioned in W.J. Bassett Lowke’s Model Railway Handbook, were he is pictured driving his 7 1/4 inch gauge B-L LMS unrebuilt Royal Scott around his garden in Pennsylvania. A copy of the photo is below.  
 

In the film there are some very nice shots of a Pennsy Atlantic, and maybe a K4 (These engines inspired Gresley to build the LNER A1’s) but I wasn’t paying attention to the wheel arrangement so it could be a 2-6-2.
 

Douglas

 

(https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/148722274/charles-norvin-rinek)

E62AD008-1FAF-4E2F-9D21-98F573A13956.jpeg

Edited by Florence Locomotive Works
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I had a text and an email today letting me know my Hornby Hobbies order would be delivered on Monday. This caused a moment of consternation as I didn’t think I had ordered anything recently. I did eventually recall (after searching emails) that I had pre ordered a couple of third class carriages for my Rocket. I think I may run them on the layout rather than the measly metre next to the computer. 

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The Pennsy K4s were magnificent locomotives, highly thought of by Hughes and influential in much of his design thinking when he was CME of the LYR/LNWR and then the LMS (albeit, sadly, not including the rather disastrous type of piston valves he employed in the Dreadnoughts). They are one of my favourite locomotive classes and I enjoyed seeing them in the film Douglas posted - thanks buddy.

 

Whilst I am generally supportive of my friend in the Muddy Hollow I was not dismayed that the men in red lost today, particularly as I was deliberately and undeservedly provoked by references in his earlier posts to Welsh cakes which, due to a c*ck up on the logistics front, are currently in short, that is to say nil, supply chez Hunt. It has to be said, though, that the men in white have played better than they did whereas the men in red have been worse. As an all round good guy, though, I will not rub it in and harp on about England winning :yahoo_mini:

 

Just to show my good nature I celebrated the final score with a glass of Penderyn. Ah, I did say I wouldn't mention England winning again didn't I? Sorry about that, I'll say no more about the fact that England were the victors. Bit of a shame about Wales losing though. 

 

Goodnight/evening/morning depending on which bit of planet Earth you are inhabiting. 

 

PS -  Did I mention the fact that England beat Wales today?

 

Dave

Edited by Dave Hunt
Almost forgot to mention the rugby result
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2 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

The Pennsy K4s were magnificent locomotives, highly thought of by Hughes and influential in much of his design thinking when he was CME of the LYR/LNWR and then the LMS (albeit, sadly, not including the rather disastrous type of piston valves he employed in the Dreadnoughts). They are one of my favourite locomotive classes and I enjoyed seeing them in the film Douglas posted - thanks buddy. ...snip...

Dave

Which may explain the Belpaire fireboxes seen on some steamers over there.

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4 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

Which may explain the Belpaire fireboxes seen on some steamers over there.

Others on this thread are far better informed than me about such things but the choice of Belpaire or roundtop fireboxes seems to have been a cultural thing. Doncaster stuck with Roundtop, Derby certainly converted to Belpaire. Swindon Crewe and Howrich did as well.  I suppose the same happenned in the US. Alco certainly stayed with roundtop.  

 

Talking of fireboxes, I better attend to the square topped wood burner that's next to me.

 

Jamie

Edited by jamie92208
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9 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

 

 

 

PS -  Did I mention the fact that England beat Wales today?

 

Dave

 

 

No, I don't  think you did. 

 

Thanks for letting all those who missed it, know .

 

Andy

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The advantage of the Belpaire firebox is purely down to rate at which is can produce steam.  Although the firebox itself is easy to manufacture because the design calls for firebox wall and the boiler walls to be parallel to one another, which allows the use of one single stay size,  there are issues with supporting the flat crown of the boiler.  It is also a more interesting task to join the flat front to the round boiler barrel.  

 

Belpaire fireboxes are well suited to the rather restrictive UK loading gauge where the firebox is placed between the frames.  However, this should not be taken in isolation as the deep firebox only really works well with certain types of coal.  The GWR had copious amounts of soft steam coal on tap from the S Wales coalfields, and this type of coal burns well when set up in a deep bed.  If you look at the east coast where coal tended to be a hard Yorkshire coal, then the burn characteristics of the coal favoured a much thinner fire to get best efficiency.  Hence Gresley's use of the wide Wootten type firebox on his locos.

 

You only have to look at the UK locomotive exchange trails that took place over the years to see that locos that performed well on certain railways, did not meet their full potential on others. 

 

I think the locomotive that really showed the potential of the Belpaire firebox in UK usage was the GWR's Churchward 28xx 2-8-0 freight loco.  A loco designed for long distance slogging with a very heavy train.

 

The design was open for development and I think that was best shown, not by the GWR, but by the LMS when Stanier produced his 8F 2-8-0.  For those not in the know Stanier had been a Swindon man until his appointment as CME of the LMS, and he took a lot of Swindon's excellent engineering practices with him.  It is much to his credit that he was prepared to create the 'Black 5' which has been claimed to be a GWR 'Hall' with outside valve gear and a bigger boiler.  If he'd stayed at Swindon it would have been called a 'County'!!

 

The 8F capitalised on the  simplicity and strength of the 28xx, but again with advantage of a bigger boiler, the outside valve gear which made preparation and maintenance so much easier, plus the commodious cab and tender, which offered the crew a great deal more protection from the weather than the GWR cab, which was a bit of a joke in comparison.  Collett who succeeded Churchward as CME on the GWR did put his 'standard' cab on the 2884 series of 2-8-0 but protection to the rear with the  low sided 3500 gallon tenders was never good.

 

As an aside, it was left to Ivatt to address the design of tenders which first appeared on his class 2 and class 4 Mogul designs.  These had small windows in the tender allowing tender first running to be a much more comfortable experience for the crews.  A design perpetuated on many of the BR standard tenders.

 

I accept that many of these locos were not designed for running any distance tender first, but there did seem an almost Victorian and rather unbending attitude to crew comfort.  Even so, it does seem rather strange that it was only during the early to mid 1930's,  probably about 100 years after steam locomotives first appeared, that sensible consideration was given to the loco crew and their wellbeing on the footplate. 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Happy Hippo
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Belpare fireboxes were widely used in Europe and introduced in the UK before the K4s appeared. They were invented by Alfred Belpaire, a Belgian locomotive engineer, in about 1864 and first appeared on the PRR in 1885 on one of the R class Consolidations having been introduced to the USA on the Shenandoah Valley RR (which was a PRR subsidiary) by an English locomotive engineer called R P Sanderson. They were then widely used on the Pennsy but the only other American railroad to make much use of them was the GN. 

 

Dave

 

PS - Good morning everyone

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American practice tended not to favour the Belpaire because they embraced all-welded construction long before the U.K., and the corners on the Belpaire design aren’t best suited to this form of construction. Anyway, they can afford the space for round top construction given their loading gauge. 

 

 

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15 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Well, I was pleasantly surprised by the  final score line in the Wales v England Rugby match this afternoon.

 

I had expected England to run riot and amass a large number of tries against the Welsh, so I found it heartening to see that it ended up as 'Death by Penalty' which harks back to the glory days of Jonny Wilkinson, rather than being put through the grinder with try after try being conceded.

 

Sam Underhill's award of man of the match was well deserved.

 

The crisps got eaten but their appearance in the kitchen prompted a ban on my making Welsh cakes.  I never knew that too much of good things made you fat(ter).  however, cider was consumed and no Penderyn was harmed during the period of the match.

 

 

 

It could easily have been 40-0, if England hadn’t given away a soft try in a schoolboy error involving kicking straight to the charge-down. I seem to remember Brian Ashton’s “golden boy”, Iain Balshaw, handing Wales the win by doing much the same thing twice in the same match, some years ago... Wales didn’t seem to have any idea how to score, England missed three simple kicks and there you have it... Wales also missed a sitter, so was it windy there? 

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26 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

England missed three simple kicks and there you have it... Wales also missed a sitter, so was it windy there? 

A bit, and the problem is probably due to the design of the stadium in that the south west stand, although apart of an all around stand complex is taller than the other three, so you get a vortex as the wind wraps around each end of the higher section (SW prevailing wind).  If it gusts the wind flow can be very unpredictable there.  It adds a bit of uncertainty for the kickers when they have to judge not only how best to cut through the swirls but also to anticipate if it is gusting.  A gust or lull which starts just as your boot hits the ball can make even the simplest of kicks go wrong.

 

Farrell and Halfpenny are both top class kickers so even the best can be caught out at Llanelli, although Halfpenny was apparently nursing an ankle injury which is why after his miss, the kicking duties went to Dan Biggar.

 

 

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The main reason for railway companies shying away from the use of Belpaire fireboxes was the extra cost of construction. The arguments for and against Belpaire boxes are many and complicated and are far too involved for a simple discussion here; suffice it to say that, as with many aspects of steam locomotive design, opinions varied and successful as well as cost-effective types were developed both with and without Belpaire boilers (and the Wooton firebox which was a development).

 

Dave

Edited by Dave Hunt
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20 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

A bit, and the problem is probably due to the design of the stadium in that the south west stand, although apart of an all around stand complex is taller than the other three, so you get a vortex as the wind wraps around each end of the higher section (SW prevailing wind).  If it gusts the wind flow can be very unpredictable there.  It adds a bit of uncertainty for the kickers when they have to judge not only how best to cut through the swirls but also to anticipate if it is gusting.  A gust or lull which starts just as your boot hits the ball can make even the simplest of kicks go wrong.

 

Farrell and Halfpenny are both top class kickers so even the best can be caught out at Llanelli, although Halfpenny was apparently nursing an ankle injury which is why after his miss, the kicking duties went to Dan Biggar.

 

 

 

Twickenham used to be well known for that sort of thing, but the construction of the new stand means it is now fully enclosed and it’s mostly a thing of the past. 

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1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

The main reason for railway companies shying away from the use of Belpaire fireboxes was the extra cost of construction. The arguments for and against Belpaire boxes are many and complicated and are far too involved for a simple discussion here; suffice it to say that, as with many aspects of steam locomotive design, opinions varied and successful as well as cost-effective types were developed both with and without Belpaire boilers (and the Wootom firebox which was a development).

 

Dave

All very true!

 

I built a GWR 2251 in Gauge 1 many years ago.

 

The prototype has a tapered Swindon no 10 boiler fitted complete with the customary Belpaire firebox.

 

The model was built with a 'conventional' round top boiler as per the Midland 4F 'Project' loco except it had a slightly smaller barrel size.  The taper boiler and the Belpaire firebox being created with cosmetic cladding.  (Quite a bit of cardboard was sacrificed before suitable templates were created!)

 

The fact that this GWR loco was running with a smaller version of a boiler designed for a Midland 4F made not one iota of difference:laugh_mini:.

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1 hour ago, Happy Hippo said:

 

 

Farrell and Halfpenny are both top class kickers so even the best can be caught out at Llanelli, although Halfpenny was apparently nursing an ankle injury which is why after his miss, the kicking duties went to Dan Biggar.

 

 

Discussion on another thread about the pronunciation of the Welsh double L.  The BBC got it very wrong this morning: Flanely.  My mother was not a Welsh speaker, but she did teach me pronunciation.  Bill

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Many years ago I was told by a number of Welsh people that the then upper terminus of the Ffestiniog was pronounced "Rid Thee" so why have heard it called "Rid Due" twice recently in TV programmes? 

Edited by Chris116
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2 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

The advantage of the Belpaire firebox is purely down to rate at which is can produce steam.  Although the firebox itself is easy to manufacture because the design calls for firebox wall and the boiler walls to be parallel to one another, which allows the use of one single stay size,  there are issues with supporting the flat crown of the boiler.  It is also a more interesting task to join the flat front to the round boiler barrel.  

 

Belpaire fireboxes are well suited to the rather restrictive UK loading gauge where the firebox is placed between the frames.  However, this should not be taken in isolation as the deep firebox only really works well with certain types of coal.  The GWR had copious amounts of soft steam coal on tap from the S Wales coalfields, and this type of coal burns well when set up in a deep bed.  If you look at the east coast where coal tended to be a hard Yorkshire coal, then the burn characteristics of the coal favoured a much thinner fire to get best efficiency.  Hence Gresley's use of the wide Wootten type firebox on his locos.

 

You only have to look at the UK locomotive exchange trails that took place over the years to see that locos that performed well on certain railways, did not meet their full potential on others. 

 

 

The LSWR was one of few companies without a coalfield.  As transportation was a major factor in the cost of coal, drivers were incentivised to burn fuel efficiently.  Apart from Drummond's 4-6-0s, the firebox of choice was round topped and deep, burning South Wales steam coal.  Most classes preferred a shallow firebed but there were exceptions, of the two Adams 0-4-4 classes, the O2 class ran best with a shallow fire, the T1 class preferred a deep bed.   Bill

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1 minute ago, bbishop said:

The LSWR was one of few companies without a coalfield.  As transportation was a major factor in the cost of coal, drivers were incentivised to burn fuel efficiently.  Apart from Drummond's 4-6-0s, the firebox of choice was round topped and deep, burning South Wales steam coal.  Most classes preferred a shallow firebed but there were exceptions, of the two Adams 0-4-4 classes, the O2 class ran best with a shallow fire, the T1 class preferred a deep bed.   Bill

 

I recall reading that, when he was on the South Western, Drummond was at pains to get his drivers to work their engines "expansively", i.e. at short cut-off. Apart from making best use of the laws of physics: PV = RT, this would contribute to fuel economy. The implication would seem to be that in Adams' day, drivers were used to running in near to full gear.

 

I dare say Drummond was popular with his firemen.

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20 minutes ago, Chris116 said:

Many years ago I was told by a number of Welsh people that the then upper terminus of the Ffestiniog was pronounced "Rid Thee" so why have heard it called "Rid Due" twice recently in TV programmes? 

 

Rid Thee is South Walian,  my mother would have pronounced it "hRud Thü".  Bill

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The middle Saturday of a childhood summer holiday was unique, which would be in a caravan in Carmarthen or Cardigan.  I would dress in school uniform (taken specially) and we would drop my sister off for her pony trekking week (lucky girl).  Then we would drive to a hillside terrace house in Merthyr to visit one of my mother's cousins.  The parlour would be opened specially and we would be served tea (milk and sugar not optional).   Then the cousins would warm up, a bit like a valve radio.  North Walian English is not the same as South Walian English and then had to get used to each other's ear, but after five minutes they were off speaking about 200 words a minute.  I couldn't understand a word but sat clutching a cold cup of tea and glaring at my equally uncomfortable second cousin.  It took about an hour to dissect a year's family history before the conversation was opened up to husbands and children.  After another hour it was back into the car, I would be told off for not drinking my tea and back to the caravan.  Bill

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36 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I recall reading that, when he was on the South Western, Drummond was at pains to get his drivers to work their engines "expansively", i.e. at short cut-off. Apart from making best use of the laws of physics: PV = RT, this would contribute to fuel economy. The implication would seem to be that in Adams' day, drivers were used to running in near to full gear.

 

I dare say Drummond was popular with his firemen.

I think you're right about his popularity.

 

Running fast in full gear is very uncomfortable for the passengers as the motion set up is a sort of surging pulse.  Not good if you are attempting to serve soup in the restaurant car.

 

The speed of the train is also somewhat limited as the steam not having been fully used expansively, slows down the exhaust process. Such an overuse of the steam also has a nasty side effect of lifting the fire off the firebars, and then you stand a good chance of losing it up the chimney which is not conducive to strict time keeping.

 

Even on a 2 ft gauge loco you are notching up the valve gear pdq to ensure a smooth ride.  Travelling 'fast' in full gear makes a Quarry Hunslet  hunt from side to side quite considerably.

 

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