Altnerative steam & modernisation

[Sylvian Tennant]

Hello there.

 

I have been interested in post 1968 BR steam since I was a small child (well roughly 11/12 years old). As to whether I would do any modelling at the moment on this subject is unknown although I would like to think most likely in the near future.

 

However at this moment I’m just doing some thinking on the subject. What I would like to know however, are thoughts on feelings on the subject. I have been greatly impressed by the efforts of Fictitious Liveries, David Wardale, Porta & the art work of Robin Barnes who have all shown great imagination on the subject of modern/Second generation steam.

 

So stories, thoughts, feelings, ideas and even pictures are all welcome to this thread.

 

So for example a few questions I would personally like answered at this stage are:

• What are your thoughts of mainline/former-mainline steam surviving into the 80/90’s?
  
• What changes could we have seen compared to the system as it was?
  
• What liveries could we have seen? (e.g. a Blue Black 5? Or would BR have seen an opportunity to keep them Black)
  
• What locomotives would have survived?
  
• Could we have seen new or different locomotive types? (e.g. BR standard 8F or 8MT or even a BR standard 10F Mallet!)
  
• How would steam have been modified to comply with any legislations and may have occurred or to keep up with changing rolling stock & infrastructure.
  

 

In the end this is a bit of alternative fun so I want no “THIS WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED BECAUSE BLAH BLAH BLAH…!” However all thoughts and suggestions are welcome

 

Thank you kindly.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

We did this fairly recently. The UK could have pursued a course much like Germany and to a lesser extent France, retaining steam in coalfield areas, and getting the economic life out of the more recently constructed locos by running them until circa 1980 and using the money saved to go from steam direct to electrification. The steam locos stay black, and the classes retained are as few as possible to get the necessary numbers from the more modern and numerous types in the higher power classifications: Riddles 9F, Stanier 8F, WD 2-8-0 and 2-10-0 for goods, Britannia, (and Clans reboilered to Britannia) Peppercorn and rebuilt Bulleid pacifics and V2s for fast workings, as many class 5 from Stanier Black 5, Riddles 5MT and Thompson B1 as necessary. All the lower powered and tank loco work goes diesel, standard shunters and DMUs.

[TheSignalEngineer]

 

What liveries could we have seen? (e.g. a Blue Black 5? Or would BR have seen an opportunity to keep them Black)

 

 

Blue 5 with a large BR arrow logo tender anyone?

[GC Jack]

A lot of speculation on this is in print.

 

It is generally accepted that the modernisation plan was a complete "cock up" wasted millions and gave the impression to the Conservative government that railway investment was "no hoper" and many historians suspect this thinking encouraged the Beeching plan.

 

Most likely scenario, if we take Germany as an example, would have seen - as has been stated here - steam in industrial areas only surviving to the 1980's.

 

Passenger steam on main lines couldn't have lasted much longer especially trains to London. Clean air legislation and an acute labour shortage, maintenance was a nightmare - no one would do the job - especially in the South East, made steam operation almost impossible.

 

Survivors would most ceratinly be the 9f's, 8f's and some WD's, but that would probably be about it.

 

All black of course.

 

Jack

[The Stationmaster]

Survivors - simples, literally. What would have lasted longest would have been outside cylinder/valvegear 2-cylinder locos - easy to maintain, reliable and relatively simple to operate.

 

The big 'what if?' is how long they would have lasted and I would have though no longer than the mid-1970s at most because of ever increasing difficulty in finding the men prepared to work with them and the decent quality coal needed to keep them running. It would have been well nigh totally unacceptable for all sorts of reasons to have put any investment into steam unless it was chicken-feed and would pay for itself within a year. So whatver it had going for it would have been nowhere enough to cope with all the things that were against it.

[PhilH]

You would have needed to find someone daft enough to work on the damned things.....it's alright now and then, not so good on a daily basis. They struggled at the end of steam in the sixties, I don't think they would have found people much later than that.

 

It's not all flying down the the steel road on your iron horse, or whatever cliches you can muster. Someone has to grope around underneath in the cold and dark, someone has to clear up the mess they make (think the mountains of ash at sheds such as Camden in the 60s). They're hot, cold, heavy, dirty in usually appaling conditions.

 

The actual locos could have lasted for years, especially the simple types - it's the people that would be the problem.

[Trainshed Terry]

 

Blue 5 with a large BR arrow logo tender anyone?

 

Careful some one on here is good with photo-shop. But not me.

 

Terry

[Sylvian Tennant]

Some good stuff on here. I can understand your point there however in many industrial heartlands people still owkred (and continue to) work in odd conditions. Tawlermen, Coal Miners, Oil Rig workers etc etc so I agree (and have made clear) that steam use would have been smaller in comparison to pre 1968 but if we were to struggle with it, how come we have people willing to volunteer for these duties on preserved railways.

 

All fair point I must have, what about some semi-privitisation of the railway i.e something similar to the preserved raiwlays we see today but not if you get my drift?

 

I like the idea of 8F, 9F & WD suriving as well as other post war types.

[GC Jack]

Some good stuff on here. I can understand your point there however in many industrial heartlands people still owkred (and continue to) work in odd conditions. Tawlermen, Coal Miners, Oil Rig workers etc etc so I agree (and have made clear) that steam use would have been smaller in comparison to pre 1968 but if we were to struggle with it, how come we have people willing to volunteer for these duties on preserved railways.

 

 

Preserved railways don't run 24/7 you don't have to spend all night in a freezing filthy shed cleaning out smoke boxes or crawling into still hot fireboxes.

 

I agree that it would be an excellent modelling "might have been" project and I look forward to seing pics on the site so go for it!!

 

I think steam could and should have been worked into the 1980's in the industrial heartlands. The ethos of working in difficult environments was - still is? - there and we had enough coal that could locally sourced.

 

Jack

[Catkins]

The OP is an interesting one, and I can see that mechanically post 1968 steam would have worked, but as some have pointed out, it's the employee element that is the deciding factor, and I can't give a simple answer to that.

People do jobs for all sorts of reasons - from needing money to liking the work environment.

I can give myself as an example of an employee - I did nine years in a warehouse, and hated being stuck inside but the pay was useful, whilst doing that job I looked for a job/career that I would enjoy, and the pay was secondary to the job.

And if Grantham or New England sheds were open when I left school, I would have gone looking for work at them.

[scots region]

What about the LMSR 4-8-4 and freightliners traffic being inagurated far earlier?

[The Stationmaster]

Some good stuff on here. I can understand your point there however in many industrial heartlands people still owkred (and continue to) work in odd conditions. Tawlermen, Coal Miners, Oil Rig workers etc etc so I agree (and have made clear) that steam use would have been smaller in comparison to pre 1968 but if we were to struggle with it, how come we have people willing to volunteer for these duties on preserved railways.

All fair point I must have, what about some semi-privitisation of the railway i.e something similar to the preserved raiwlays we see today but not if you get my drift?

I like the idea of 8F, 9F & WD suriving as well as other post war types.

As already noted preserved railways - where people do a few odd days 'for fun' doesn't really compare with a 7 day-a-week job on rubbish money in a filthy environment in all weathers. The difficulty in recruiting shed labouring staff began in the 1950s and was part of the spur for the first lot of West Indian immigration - BR was actively recruiting in the West Indies in the early '50s because it couldn't get staff any other way in some parts of the country where jobs were easy to get and just about everyone except farmers paid more than the railway. The 'romance of steam' might sound very attractive as you think of your favourite loco steaming past at speed and all the rest; digging ash out of a firebox at three in the morning when it's p***ing down with rain or shovelling char out of a smokebox when every part of the footplate is covered in ice and your hands are freezing raw is not most folks' idea of a nice way to earn a few quid a week.

 

By the early 1970s we had enough trouble recruiting Goods Guards in areas of relatively high (for the time) unemployment in the Cardiff Valleys because some folk were better off on the dole. If they couldn't be bothered to get out of bed for a job like that I could hardly see them going for a much filthier and far worse paid labouring in a steam shed. Some tough jobs - such as those you mention - attracted people because the money could be good (albeit not guaranteed to be good) and that compensated for the bad points, the railway couldn't afford to do that notwithstanding the fact that it could have still run several hundred steam engines provided it was prepared to carry on paying for the infrastructure they needed.

[GC Jack]

I agree with the above by station master, despite my earlier comments. But the Germans did manage it anyone know how?

 

Jack

[Ozexpatriate]

In the vein of post-1970 steam I really liked "scots region"'s idea of a post-appocalyptic 1984 themed layout from the unusual layout themes thread. It's not quite 2011, but grubby steam fits very well in this millieu. It had me thinking and I haven't quite abandoned the idea.

 

Any of the strategic reserve conspiracy theory-inspired concepts would work well too in a relatively modern setting.

 

Somehow for me the idea of a world containing shiny glass fronted buildings, new high efficiency cars and regular revenue service steam trains is so jarringly anachronistic, that only the dystopian alternative reality ideas work for me. (But that's just my opinion, which frankly shouldn't matter to anyone but me.)

 

The idea of the BR corporate 'large logo' arrows of indecision on a flat tender side does have a certain appeal - the post blue, sector liveries could actually work on a steam locomotive with the sector logo on the cab side.

 

One question I thought of, if steam were still employed, would TOCs want to put vinyls on a locomotive? I'm thinking ideas like First Great Westerns' lining on the tender?

 

If steam propulsion existed today (outside of rail tours and preservation), would streamlining be popular? At a minimum there would certainly be smoke deflectors and perhaps turbines instead of pistons. Perhaps even the steam turbine + generator + traction behemouths that the coal conveyors (B&O, C&O, N&W) experimented with in the 1940s in US. The British equivalent would have dual cabs, a bit like a Bulleid Leader but with traction wheelsets.

[coachmann]

So much has changed in the past 50 years that thinking you know what it was like before you were born doesn't work. 50 years ago was a different planet. One had to be there to know what it was like for folk or what passed through their minds. I'll try to wise you up!

 

Whatever you have today, you will almost certainly regarded as 'normal'.....A mixture of cultures and beleifs living in your town and highly visible on TV screens.....Adverts like 'go compare' and PPI claims......X-Factor....Get me out of here.....central heating.......double glazing....cars that easily top 80mph whatever their size....motorways....rampant sex options and binge drinking among girls. Most of this didnt exist 50 years ago.

 

Men who worked all their lives (save for the war years) down coal mines, in ship yards, in heavy engineering, bus or tram driving, steam railway work etc etc were used to the conditions they worked in.Their dads and grandfathers had done the same work in many families. The young 'uns had to measure up and they did, afterall they had nothing to compare their lives with and knew nothing else. They had no warm home to go to, well not warm as in a centrally heated double glzed, insulated home. Many folk (school kids mostly) had to light the living room fire when they got home and it would take a couple of hours to warm up that room while the rest of the house remained freezing. Men worked five and a half days with a 50-odd hour week as normal but they did at least get decent shift-rate. Everything was relative just as it is now and applying for a job on the railway held no fears for men and boys. They were labourers with no 0-levels, ULCI's and whatever and took whatever earned a crust. Being lazy and drawing benefits was a very short option when there was so many labouring jobs around.

 

Yes some boys and young men were on the lookout for cleaner jobs in the 1950s and 60s. I recall men leaving the buses in the 1960s because such and such a company were paying sixpence an hour more. Then they would drift back at the next round of pay rises. Engineering was the same. But the ones who were in it for the long term weren't for budging.

 

Not for nothing was there a romance about railway work amongst small boys. They weren't masachists! Boys expected to work from 15 till 65. Footplate work and all that it entailed (disposal, knocking up and the like) was hard but no harder than many others. And it was a job for life so you could plan ahead, pass the exams and work towards further promotion. Of course there were times when one was soaking wet and pretty hacked especially at 3am in the morning and wishing it were booking off time, but there were also the good days ambling along on a warm day at the head of mineral wagons with the wind in ones face, or playing cards in a yard hut and taking the mickey out of some poor crew who had been struggling with a dud engine. Jobs like the railway had a commerade that doesn't exist today because of insecurity and short-term-ism.

 

I hope I have painted a more realistic picture.

[Arthur]

They'd probably have been able to recruit men in the seventies as heavy industry was shedding large numbers of manual jobs. The steel industry, for one example, lost tens of thousands in that decade many of whom were used to hot, dirty, arduous manual labour and shift work. By the eighties everybody wanted to be a Yuppie and that's when the real struggle to recruit new labour would have started.

[scots region]

In the vein of post-1970 steam I really liked "scots region"'s idea of a post-appocalyptic 1984 themed layout from the unusual layout themes thread. It's not quite 2011, but grubby steam fits very well in this millieu. It had me thinking and I haven't quite abandoned the idea.

 

Any of the strategic reserve conspiracy theory-inspired concepts would work well too in a relatively modern setting.

 

Somehow for me the idea of a world containing shiny glass fronted buildings, new high efficiency cars and regular revenue service steam trains is so jarringly anachronistic, that only the dystopian alternative reality ideas work for me. (But that's just my opinion, which frankly shouldn't matter to anyone but me.)

 

The idea of the BR corporate 'large logo' arrows of indecision on a flat tender side does have a certain appeal - the post blue, sector liveries could actually work on a steam locomotive with the sector logo on the cab side.

 

One question I thought of, if steam were still employed, would TOCs want to put vinyls on a locomotive? I'm thinking ideas like First Great Westerns' lining on the tender?

 

If steam propulsion existed today (outside of rail tours and preservation), would streamlining be popular? At a minimum there would certainly be smoke deflectors and perhaps turbines instead of pistons. Perhaps even the steam turbine + generator + traction behemouths that the coal conveyors (B&O, C&O, N&W) experimented with in the 1940s in US. The British equivalent would have dual cabs, a bit like a Bulleid Leader but with traction wheelsets.

 

Actually on something similar to this I just thought about the ACE 3000.

 

http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/ult.html

 

You could have it that the 70s oil shock balooned into something far worse promting the technology such as this, Including 5AT in the UK of course, there certainally wouldn't be a lack of options for conversion back then. Or you choose a modern setting, when mankind has finally drained the good earth of this life-taking crude.

 

ScR

[TheSignalEngineer]

 

Actually on something similar to this I just thought about the ACE 3000.

 

http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/ult.html

 

 

I quite fancy the Garratt option shown, and the erecting shop is still standing at Gorton.

[Ozexpatriate]

 

I quite fancy the Garratt option shown, and the erecting shop is still standing at Gorton.

Half way down the page, here's another Garratt design linked from the original article. It uses a condenser to retain boiler water and a powered fan for draught. This would be an interesting design to model and is very much in the spirit of the OP.

 

Of course they could burn "clean coal". (Says he smirking at the outrageous irony of such a moniker.)

[Oscale]

Of course they could burn "clean coal".

Or fit pantographs to the cab roofs and heating elements in the firebox.

http://en.wikipedia....team_locomotive

[Sylvian Tennant]

Some interesting ideas on here, especially the electric fired locomtive and the rmweb page dealing with unusual directinos taken my the modellers I apperciate the more realistic aspect of some opinions as well. It's showning my areas with which I may need to think about properly.

 

So in respect to steam continuing what would this mean for the industrial areas e.g. MGR trains, double heading... restricted areas. My initial ideas were based around areas such as North West Scotland/Wales/North West & North East England.

 

What may have kept these people working for the railways? I fully appreciate the condition were bad but we could look at alt fuel sources e.g. light oil firing or electric firing! just to give a couple of examples.

 

Sorry if I've missed any ideas there, I know there was some livery suggestinos invovling vynals but I don't have much time at the moment but please, the idea of black post 1968 locomtives as realistic as they were doesn't attract me too much! Though worth an investigation by all means!

[coachmann]

Every time someone says "Conditions were bad in steam days", I think blimey, it has put it on the same level as the workhouse and bowls of gruel. Not even coal mining has as bad a reputation as railway work......

[WindyHale76]

I remember reading somewhere that the Rebuilt Merchant Navy class was designed to last until the late 1970s. So if the 3rd Rail didn't run to Bournemouth and the class 47s weren't available in large numbers, we might of seen thse mighty locomotives running during the summer of 76.

[The Stationmaster]

They'd probably have been able to recruit men in the seventies as heavy industry was shedding large numbers of manual jobs. The steel industry, for one example, lost tens of thousands in that decade many of whom were used to hot, dirty, arduous manual labour and shift work. By the eighties everybody wanted to be a Yuppie and that's when the real struggle to recruit new labour would have started.

But the actuality told a different story - I was working in a South Wales yard in the early part of the 1970s and despite it being an outside job (which appealed to many people) and despite it being manual work (which also appealed to many people) we ran with a perpetual bunch of vacancies, both in the yard and for Guards. Notwithstanding the virtual collapse of ship repairing a few years earlier in nearby Cardiff and the continuing retrenchment of mining and the steel industry. Many who worked in the yard loved the life (notwithstanding a few odd moans) and we could occasionally pick up some decent blokes but the drop-out rate on Guards' courses was about 20-30% within a couple of months of end of training because of the shift patterns and the poor pay. When I shifted back to England, again with a fairly busy yard and buoyant traffic, one of my colleagues had spent a lot of time trying to recruit Guards - literally at the prison gates at one time. The shifts and poor pay again put folk off.

 

Coming to the comment above about Germany I think one critical difference there was security of employment (many in Britain saw the 1970s railway as a shrinking employment opportunity with redundancy a real threat), better pay and infinitely better conditions despite much of the work being very similar or exactly the same. I saw much the same in Poland in the mid 1970s but even there, in a heavily 'managed' economy PKP clearly had difficulty in recruiting footplate and running shed staff in the north of the country while in the south the picture was the exact opposite.

[Catkins]

One option that might be explored in the vein of the ACE 3000, is the possibility to have pulverised coal fired engines. They wouldn't need a fireman as the coal would be fed into the firebox by a mechanical stoker, which then opens up the possibility of having a "Cab forward double ended steam locomotive".

As for the facilities that would be required, you would still need to have coaling and watering arrangements, but the coaling could be done using pipes and air pressure to deliver the coal, and the ash could be cleaned out using a similar method - ready for loading into a flyash wagon or train.

I think that the liveries would develop along similar lines to how they have developed anyway.

 

I am not sure that having electric elements powered by overhead wires would make a good mix.