Oldest loco at grouping

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1 hour ago, JimC said:

He put together a list of what he thought were desirable specifications, which isn't quite the same thing. The result was some peculiar and impractical locomotives, but Brunel hadn't done anything approaching designing them. 

 

In both cases, the requirement wasnt based on experience, as there wasno experience to draw from, just a vision for the future.

Unlike Bulleid’s leader... there was a century of technological experience which seemed to be ignored.

[The Johnster]

IIRC (by which I mean reading about it, even I'm not old enough to recall the actual events!) Brunel's specs were used for the original locos, which were a varied and not very effective bunch.  But one worked well, Stephenson's North Star, which had originally been designed for another railway.  Stephenson's sent a chap by the name of Gooch down with her to set her up for service, and he never went back to Newcastle; Brunel offered him the job of loco superintendent on the spot.  What Robert Stephenson made of this poaching is not recorded, but would of course have been in a Geordie accent.  

 

Much is made of the rivalry between the two great engineers, exacerbated by the public bear pit of the Gauge Commission, but the mens' rivalry was professional and they seem to have had very high regard for each other on a personal level, and got on well enough with each other.  The GW got a bargain with Gooch, though, the man who founded the success of the Broad Gauge with the Fireflies and Iron Dukes, and who built Swindon works and the 'new' town; those railway cottages are still very desirable properties.  He earned his knighthood!

 

That Harrison's 'Thunderer' met Brunel's specs is probably as good an indication as any of why some of those locos didn't work; I'm no engineer but it was pretty obvious to me why the loco was a failure the first time I saw a drawing of her.  There wasn't a lot of experience around then to draw on, but it was pretty well known that driving wheels wouldn't grip unless there was a load bearing down on them.  Truth seems to be that Brunel, while he could do a good bridge and cobble up a half tidy steamship (at least until the Great Eastern), wasn't really up to the mark when it came to locomotives.  The Broad Gauge seems to have been rooted in the desire for stability at speed rather than providing easing of the restrictions on locomotive design; the rest of the loading gauge restrictions were much the same as they were on other railways and no advantage was gained in that respect.

 

Perhaps one of Ismbard's motivation for the South Devon atmospheric experiment was his realisation that he was out of his depth with railway locomotives; this system simply dispensed with them altogether.  it sucked...