Modernisation Plan Diesels

[Coryton]

I've often wondered why the Americans still favour single ended locos actually, since it means retaining wyes and turntables (and silly things like the balloon loop around Miami Amtrak station; that's something for the "prototype for everything" thread...).

 

Amtrak like to keep all the seats facing forwards on long distance services.

 

They could have someone go down the train reversing all the seats at the terminus. But it's much quicker to turn the whole train round. And if you do that, you don't need a cab at both ends of your locomotive.

 

Their electric locomotives ARE double cabbed.

[jjb1970]

The Japanese Shinkansen trains have seats set to face fwd all the time unless passengers want to spin a group around for a facing bay of four or six seats. They have a very nifty mechanism for doing it.

[The Stationmaster]

Weren't Warships and Westerns Type 4?

 

The emerging consensus seems to be that the production DEs were rather dull, and in the case of 40s and Peaks, disappointingly heavy, but what is the view of the DHs?

 

On a personal note, I was always thought of the Westerns (like the Hymeks) as "modern", and the 40s and, especially, the Peaks as having a sort of "antique" fascination.

 

Even as a boy, I could tell just by looking at 40s and Peaks that they represented a "previous generation", and I thought of them as close relations of the LMS twins and the SR locos; sort of "late steam age" locos, that went very well with "the crumbling edge of quality" that was BR(E) and BR(M)(electric bits excepted) in the early 70s.

 

Kevin

There was a whole leap forward in 'styling' between most of the Pilot Scheme designs and the second generation  - some of the latter receiving considerable stylistic design input.

 

The thousands were basically a good design although over the years they had their share of various problems.  Right from the off the transmission showed a slight inclination to not immediately reverse when told to do so but it was a simple matter to press the 'Tooth on Tooth' test button and get an immediate result but they were very powerful, good acceleration, and a good top speed although it was limited by the engine governors which kept it well below the transmission overheating range - theoretically the engine/transmission combination would allow them to reach 116 mph but I doubt if one ever went anything like that fast although I stopwatched sometime well into the 90s.

 

They had two major faults in everyday service - first of all the cabs were like a greenhouse with those huge windows and good get very hot despite all sorts of mods to try and keep them cool and secondly they bounced badly at c.50mph which was a right nuisance when we had them on the Mendip stone trains.  But otherwise they rode well at all other speeds - far better than the Brush design which rolled quite a bit of track with a bit of twist in it.  And they had a  high starting tractive effort - very useful on the stone trains plus that superb advantage of al the diesel hydraulics which allowed them to run through quite deep floodwater without any problems and in conditions which tended to destroy traction motors on diesel electrics.  I always thought it a great shame that the proposed higher horsepower version was not progressed.

 

I din't have so much to do with the D8XX 'Warships' - the NBL locos had a typical NBL built reputation - and all of them suffered a bit of bouncing at high speeds which was a hangover from the early bogie problems.  But they could handle heavy trains and a gain their starting tractive effort was good.  Their amusing trait, quickly cured by adding bolts, was the ability of the cab floorboards to levitate at a certain speed range and even after they were bolted down there was still some interesting vibration (caused by the transmission).

 

I am of course no doubt biased in favour of the hydraulics but - unlike the Class 50s - I never had to organise loco changes to deal with 16 (sixteen) failures in traffic on a Summer Saturday and at least you could ride through Friars Jcn on the Up Main on the hydraulics without thinking it was likely to turnover - which was definitely how it felt on the Brush Type 4.

[railsquid]

The Japanese Shinkansen trains have seats set to face fwd all the time unless passengers want to spin a group around for a facing bay of four or six seats. They have a very nifty mechanism for doing it.

 

Pretty much all limited express trains here have that facility, with more recent ones it's even automated, so seat direction can be changed automatically at the terminus. Watching a 16-car Shinkansen being cleaned and turned around at Tokyo Station within 10 minutes is one of the wonders of the modern railway world.

 

Anyway getting slightly back on topic, Japan did go through its own diesel pilot scheme in the post-war period (electrics were adopted much earlier, including a small batch from NBL), one of which was a diesel-hydraulic of German influence which didn't last long in service (DF90 IIRC). On the other hand centre-cab diesels did take off here, including the ubiquitous diesel-hydraulic Co-Bo DE10.

[Nearholmer]

" I stopwatched sometime well into the 90s."

 

Yes, I sometimes made slightly circuitous journeys in order to ride Reading-Paddington or vice versa, "clocking" them, and even over that short hop they would get close to the magic number on almost any clear run.

 

Worshipping them, as happened c1975-76 was beyond me though!

 

K

[jjb1970]

Pretty much all limited express trains here have that facility, with more recent ones it's even automated, so seat direction can be changed automatically at the terminus. Watching a 16-car Shinkansen being cleaned and turned around at Tokyo Station within 10 minutes is one of the wonders of the modern railway world.

 

Anyway getting slightly back on topic, Japan did go through its own diesel pilot scheme in the post-war period (electrics were adopted much earlier, including a small batch from NBL), one of which was a diesel-hydraulic of German influence which didn't last long in service (DF90 IIRC). On the other hand centre-cab diesels did take off here, including the ubiquitous diesel-hydraulic Co-Bo DE10.

I found Japanese railways were the one rail network that really did make British railways feel backwards. I've spent time travelling on quite a few overseas railways including Switzerland and Germany and whilst they are ahead of ours in some aspects I've never felt ours were shown up by them and on the whole the overall average of UK rail services compare well. Japan on the other hand was in a different class, and not because of speed. The Shinkansen trains are indeed fast but the narrow gauge network is also very impressive and it is the absolute reliability of trains, the efficiency of services and sense of total professionalism. Japan is the only place I've ever been where if I had an important meeting and had to arrive at a station at say 12:00 I'd feel confident in taking a train scheduled to get me there at 12:00 rather than half an hour or more before. I got the feeling that the Shinkansen trains in particular were operating pretty much at the limits of what is possible in operational terms.

[Peter Kazmierczak]

Mainline diesels were just a sideshow, between steam and electrification. Well that was the aim only a year or two before the 1955 Modernisation Plan.

 

There was much debate on electrification in the early 1950s, especially as to whether 1,500vDC or 3,000vDC was to be the standard. In the event 1,500vDC was chosen (with 3rd rail only in the SE, though extending as far west as Salisbury and Weymouth - it wasn't considered economic to convert all those lines to overhead current collection).

 

With Riddles an (effective) advocate for the continuation of steam until electrification was up and running, there was little or no development of the LMS "Twins" or the SR diesel trio. The GWR-inspired gas-turbines were also very much a dead end too.

[APOLLO]

Most comfortable DMU's that I travelled on were the three car Class 110, the centre car of which was unpowered therefore quiet !! (TSL - Trailer second lavatory)

 

Attending tech at Manchester back around 1972/3 I travelled daily from Wigan on the Southport-Wigan- Salford - Manchester 6 car (two unit) express. I always made for the quiet centre car as this was a fast train, engines were worked hard.

 

Pacers now (spew) - Roll on the electrics !! (via Bolton in a couple of years touch wood.

 

Brit15

[Northroader]

On the matter of D1000/ Western /class 52 locos. To me the main problem was the engines, but before that a simple detail was the relatively flat drivers desk was useful to put a cup of tea laced with sugar on, with plenty of joins where switches and indicator lights came through, as underneath was the electrical control cubicle. Nuff said. Then there was the windscreen wipers which swept against the airflow passing over rather than with it. Now the engines were made with individual cylinder heads, a boxlike structure with a combustion chamber in the middle, six? Inlet / exhaust valves, and injector, surrounded by coolant. Very complicated to fabricate and machine, and most susceptible to sudden temperature changes which could cause uneven expansion leading to fracture. Even on start-up the coolant was preheated. The cooling was by a circulating system from radiators in the usual way. The air cooling the radiators was blown through by fans driven by a hydrostatic oil system. This was a small engine shaft drive pump producing high pressure oil which fed through metal pipe work to a motor on the fans. Sounds simple enough, but the tendency was for the pipe joints, of which there were many, to weep oil through the joints due to vibration and pressure, if not fracture. Coolant got too hot, and cylinder heads could start to crack, with coolant and oil leaking out and problem becoming worse. Remaking and tightening pipe joints repetitively couldn't have helped, so the main headache on the depots was repairing coolant systems and changing cylinder heads. The heads went back to Swindon, who couldn't do much to them. There was a mound of the things in one shop, which the locals called the "Berlin Wall".

[Zomboid]

One thing I've heard about how Japanese railways are so reliable is that they double up on certain bits of infrastructure. For example they'll provide a back up point machine in some, if not all places.

[Talltim]

That's a more rounded view of costs. What's the price of fitting and maintaining a point motor compared with half a million people half an hour late to work? (Thinking of the effects of a point motor failure somewhere like London Bridge)

[rockershovel]

I've always felt that the main difference between British and European railways, is that European railways have a quite different purpose and goal. The semi-privatised national networks generally retain unified ticketing structures, simple pricing, and more effective coverage (particularly the Dutch and German ones). The integration of local services with nationsl services is generally more effective.

 

They seem to achieve this without the constant circus of tendering and franchising, without the kaleidoscope of liveries and acronyms which have completely failed to capture the attention or enthusiasm of the travelling public, and generally somewhat cheaper, although this last isn't always the case.

 

I'll qualify all the above by saying that travel on any form of public transport in any of the FSU countries is quite dire, and should be avoided wherever possible, unless you are on some sort of enthusiast excursion.

 

Japanese railways are just on a different plane entirely. The Japanese ultimately believe that technical excellence is a goal in itself, and if you get THAT right then the profits will follow. They also feel that the railways are an essential service, that the functioning of that necessary service comes before the dividends of the railway company, and that indulging in a paper-fight of conflicting contractual charges and counter-charges is NOT a solution to operational weakness. How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!

[Zomboid]

That's a more rounded view of costs. What's the price of fitting and maintaining a point motor compared with half a million people half an hour late to work? (Thinking of the effects of a point motor failure somewhere like London Bridge)

That's a debateable point. With the way the industry is structured, getting access to the LB throat is very difficult and expensive. So if the point motor is generally reliable (and they are), providing another one and maintaining/fixing it could be very expensive compared to taking the hit once every 5 years.

Not saying one way or the other is better, but there's a balance to be struck with that kind of thing.

[Nearholmer]

I can't comment on modern "main line" practice in the UK, which looks a bit dysfunctional at times, because of division of accountability, but in terms of "metro" practice ........

 

The cost of customers' time is well researched and understood, so the cost of delays is well understood, which allows for a pretty simple calculation of where it is best to spend money to reduce delays. With a "legacy" railway, it isn't always a simple step from identifying cause of delays (or better still, potential cause of delays) to implementing a fix, because the fix sometimes requires fundamental change, but the principle is simple, and, when applied, it works.

 

As an instance, the Victoria Line on the Underground achieves reliability that is "up there with the best" when viewed globally, and it has some very challenging features .......for instance, at Brixton, every move in a 36 trains per hour (in each direction) service has to go across one scissors crossing, so that scissors is "built like a battleship" and cared for like a newborn baby.

 

One thing metros are very good at is sharing best practice across the globe, the "trade bodies" (Comet and Nova) being very active, and there being a fair degree of movement of staff between, for instance, London, New York, SE Asia, HK, Australia, and the new metros in the middle east, and lots of to-and-fro between London, Paris and Berlin, even to Shanghai and Moscow. Stealing one another's ideas is a way of life in metros, whereas main line rail in the UK still seems to be faintly NIH.

 

Is any of this OT?

 

K

[david.hill64]

Is any of this OT?

 

K

Pretty much all of it! But interesting all the same.

 

Comments about Comet and Nova and metros sharing good practice are spot on.

 

Not sure I agree with the NIH comment re mainline. BR was an active member of European programmes and it and its successors have often tried to discover how to emulate the success of Japan's railways ( quite difficult without Japanese staff and passengers). In terms of technology we have for a long time been open about procurement and bought things from other countries in a way that would never happen in France or Germany  some other countries.

[jonny777]

On the matter of D1000/ Western /class 52 locos. To me the main problem was the engines, but before that a simple detail was the relatively flat drivers desk was useful to put a cup of tea laced with sugar on, with plenty of joins where switches and indicator lights came through, as underneath was the electrical control cubicle. Nuff said. Then there was the windscreen wipers which swept against the airflow passing over rather than with it. Now the engines were made with individual cylinder heads, a boxlike structure with a combustion chamber in the middle, six? Inlet / exhaust valves, and injector, surrounded by coolant. Very complicated to fabricate and machine, and most susceptible to sudden temperature changes which could cause uneven expansion leading to fracture. Even on start-up the coolant was preheated. The cooling was by a circulating system from radiators in the usual way. The air cooling the radiators was blown through by fans driven by a hydrostatic oil system. This was a small engine shaft drive pump producing high pressure oil which fed through metal pipe work to a motor on the fans. Sounds simple enough, but the tendency was for the pipe joints, of which there were many, to weep oil through the joints due to vibration and pressure, if not fracture. Coolant got too hot, and cylinder heads could start to crack, with coolant and oil leaking out and problem becoming worse. Remaking and tightening pipe joints repetitively couldn't have helped, so the main headache on the depots was repairing coolant systems and changing cylinder heads. The heads went back to Swindon, who couldn't do much to them. There was a mound of the things in one shop, which the locals called the "Berlin Wall".

 

 

Gerry Fiennes recounts that the WR had big problems with the axles on both the Westerns and Hymeks in the mid 60s, and had to replace them all.  They were fracturing after 180k miles or so.

 

Fortunately they purchased equipment from Canada which enabled the fitters to scan the axles while on the locos, because prior to that they were having to lift the locos to get the bogies out for examination and doing 6 locos per weekend.

[The Stationmaster]

" I stopwatched sometime well into the 90s."

 

Yes, I sometimes made slightly circuitous journeys in order to ride Reading-Paddington or vice versa, "clocking" them, and even over that short hop they would get close to the magic number on almost any clear run.

 

Worshipping them, as happened c1975-76 was beyond me though!

 

K

You were lucky - you didn't have to keep on chasing off the bl**dy 'disciples' who had a habit of getting into all sorts of places where they were wanted  (mind you some were well behaved although I doubt if that particular - at that time juvenile - member of RMweb is following this particular thread and taking exception to me  lumping him in with the 'nuisances').

[Northroader]

Ultrasonic axle testing became applied to all the diesels in those days. The axles weren't, of course, plain parallel but had several changes of section across the length, such as wheel seats, gear seats, and the gear case seals, I think. Fatigue cracks were known about and the importance of surface finish applied, but cracks could still develop. A specially trained operator applied a scanner on the axle end, greased, and the scanner was shaped at an angle, to "look" along the inside surface of the axle, as the operator moved the scanner round. He was watching a cathode ray tube, which gave a flickering horizontal line, with little whiskery blips showing where the steps in the axle were, and also incipient cracks. This was repeated for both ends. Testing was done on a programme, so the whole deal was under control, with nothing going "ping" out on the track.

[jjb1970]

I tended to find that to a typical British manager a typical Japanese way of doing business would be written off as woefully inefficient and ripe for "improvement". Whenever I went to the ship yards and big diesel engine builders they tended to be more labour intensive than a typical European or American equivalents and despite perceived wisdom many of their factories were not actually particularly high tech (certainly no more so than European or American equivalents). However what they were was utterly obsessive about delivering to contract, on time and on budget and applying a philosophy that it is much better to get something right first time than to repeat work to correct defects. They tended to put way more effort into the initial planning stages of a project than we do but it always struck me that the effort was time and money well spent. I always felt we could learn an awful lot from the Japanese, who themselves learnt an awful lot from US wartime industrial management practices.

[jjb1970]

On the hydraulics, I think the Hymeks and Warships were terrific looking locomotives but I am a bit cold on the Westerns. There is an old "truism" that if it looks right then it is right, unfortunately the opposite often seems true for trains. I love the look of the NBL Type 1's (austere but purposeful looking to my eyes) and their Type 2's (there is something really rather endearing about the hang dog look) but they were hardly good locomotives. The Claytons were lovely looking locomotives but not particularly good and I had a bit of a soft spot for the Class 50 which could hardly be called a great locomotive. The Class 47 was a very attractive locomotive and whilst I think the type gave BR good service and was the backbone of much of BR's operations it was never the best design. On the other hand the Class 37 has been a very solid type but I never warmed to its looks and really don't like the type. The Class 66 seems to have been a dependable and solid type but is not a good looking design I think, its best feature style wise being that it is an awful lot better than the truly awful Class 70.

[rockershovel]

I would agree with jjb1970, above, but I'm not entirely sure quite what his point is, and I certainly have deep reservations about what we could or could not learn from the Japanese, so I'll offer a European comparison.

 

I do quite a lot of work with European contractors, especially Italian, Dutch and German ones. The Italians are considerably more efficient than their chaotic appearance tends to suggest, although that efficiency does at times, consist of removing problems from discussion rather than solving them.

 

The Dutch and Germans tend to be more efficient because they have more continuity and assurance of work, longer contracts, less time spent in unproductive tendering and contractual jockeying for position, but above all because they have a far better system for producing tradesmen, integrating those tradesmen with graduate staff, managing relations between companies and staff and producing a shared sense of responsibility for the product and the company.

 

I wouldn't be unquestioningly rosy-tinted about this, but there is no doubt that their system works better than ours in the generality.

[SwissRailPassion]

The Japanese have such a variety of rolling stock and some very sturdy reliable DMUs from the 70s still doing excellent service. I feel our 14x and 150s are much inferior to the rugged KiHa 40

[jjb1970]

I would agree with jjb1970, above, but I'm not entirely sure quite what his point is, and I certainly have deep reservations about what we could or could not learn from the Japanese, so I'll offer a European comparison.

 

I do quite a lot of work with European contractors, especially Italian, Dutch and German ones. The Italians are considerably more efficient than their chaotic appearance tends to suggest, although that efficiency does at times, consist of removing problems from discussion rather than solving them.

 

The Dutch and Germans tend to be more efficient because they have more continuity and assurance of work, longer contracts, less time spent in unproductive tendering and contractual jockeying for position, but above all because they have a far better system for producing tradesmen, integrating those tradesmen with graduate staff, managing relations between companies and staff and producing a shared sense of responsibility for the product and the company.

 

I wouldn't be unquestioningly rosy-tinted about this, but there is no doubt that their system works better than ours in the generality.

Just an observation given that the thread strayed into discussing aspects of Japanese trains. I find Japanese trains representative of Japan in general.

If looking at this sort of stuff, some UK companies are world class and produce world leading products. Although now part of GE the former Converteam/Alstom/GEC etc etc business still produces some of the finest electrical equipment in the world, ditto Roll Royce. However in general I also think that UK industry does lag some others and the reasons for that are complex. Most of the issues often mentioned are common to the rest of Europe, if you go to Germany, the Netherlands etc they whinge about skills shortages as much as we do and are also pretty reliant on imported skills. My admiration for Japanese engineering is based on the fact they deliver what they say they will deliver and like to get it right first time. I never saw any other country where this was so firmly embedded into the culture of business. When I worked in electricity I was involved with new power plant construction where the prime contractors were German or French. A Siemens plant (managed by German senior staff with all the shop floor people being East European) was several months late, shoddily built and took about 5 years after hand over to get right. Alstom hit the limit of their liquidated damage liability before they'd finished pile driving at another site. In ship building I was never impressed by any of the European yards next to the Japanese and Korean yards, again it wasn't that the Japanese or Koreans were more high tech (they weren't) or that the brochure specs were better (often they weren't) but the ships were handed over to spec, on time and on budget without a long warranty and worked in a way that was extremely rare in Europe. I was in a position in my last job to have a very good over view of the relative performances of engine builders and ship yards around the world and in those sectors at least if considering quality the Japanese were still the gold standard with Korea biting their heels and nowhere else in the world anywhere near either of those two countries.

[jjb1970]

The Japanese have such a variety of rolling stock and some very sturdy reliable DMUs from the 70s still doing excellent service. I feel our 14x and 150s are much inferior to the rugged KiHa 40

The variety of Japanese trains is a bit odd as they have vast numbers of identifit high density suburban EMUs that look pretty much the same to my eyes except for flashes of colour but some of the limited express trains and Shinkansen trains are glorious looking trains. I thought that high speed trains hit a peak of visual impact with the Series 500 Shinkansen, more like an aircraft than a train before it went to those weird duck bill noses. The Series 300 was a great train too, when the 300 came out many disliked it as it broke from the traditional Shinkansen style but I thought they were lovely trains. The Series 0 is a genuinely iconic design although I actually preferred the 100 and 200. And in Japan every now and again they do something utterly bonkers.

For locomotives, the classic EF81 was one of my favourites and the DF200 and EF200 were both very attractive designs.

[Zomboid]

My experience in this country is that there is never enough time allowed for the design process, with the consequence being that the design needs amending post construction, which is expensive and usually means the optimum solution is not achievable. If the Japanese are getting the design right before building, then it's easy to see where their reputation comes from...