Imaginary Locomotives

[Mike 84C]

And I thought cromulent was in the same vein as hovertate, invented by my stepdaughter to describe Christmas lights that looked as if they were floating in trees. Do feel free to encourage the use of "hovertate" !

[Mike 84C]

That G&D 4-8-0 looks sort of N&W but like lots of J. Allens things you can never quite pin them down.

 I always thought a 9f would have been better with a deeper firebox but how do you do that with a driving wheel under it? Smaller driving wheels, or a firebox out to full loading gauge like the Reading RR? that might need two fireholes like on the Wooten fireboxes that Baldwin built. Belpair firebox with a Wooten grate and two fireholes, what would ASLEF have made of that? Maybe a BR 10f? but it would have allowed the burning of very poor quality coal and dross.

[6990WitherslackHall]

1 hour ago, Mike 84C said:

Do feel free to encourage the use of "hovertate" !

I thought that was another name for a flying potato 😂

[tythatguy1312]

I've always felt 4-8-0's were an avenue most feared to tread. America only built ~25 of them, and they absolutely adored engines twice the size of whatever Britain was doing. With high quality coal or oil, you could probably end up with a monstrous freight/passenger loco, as the French did.

[6990WitherslackHall]

5 minutes ago, tythatguy1312 said:

I've always felt 4-8-0's were an avenue most feared to tread. America only built ~25 of them, and they absolutely adored engines twice the size of whatever Britain was doing. With high quality coal or oil, you could probably end up with a monstrous freight/passenger loco, as the French did.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the biggest steam locomotives we had were LNER, LMS, SR and BR standard pacifics, the Gresley P1/P2s, U1 Garretts, 9Fs, LMS 8Fs, WD 2-8-0s, WD 2-10-0s and Big Bertha.

Edited April 4, 2022 by 6990WitherslackHall

[tythatguy1312]

3 minutes ago, 6990WitherslackHall said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the biggest steam locomotives we had were LNER, LMS, SR and BR standard pacifics, the Gresley P1/P2s, U1 Garretts, 9Fs, LMS 8Fs, WD 2-8-0s, WD 2-10-0s and Big Bertha.

going by tractive effort and sheer size, the single biggest was the LNER U1, followed up by the LMS' own Garratts and the BR Standard class 9F. Although the other ones are all undeniably large, they're not really in the same ballpark as those monsters

[The Johnster]

The UK steam tonnage hauled record was held for many years by what at first sight appears to be a completely unsuitable locomotive, though admittedly a large one by UK standards, The Great Bear, a coal working from Stoke Gifford to Acton, and probably the greatest achievement this locomotive ever managed.  Beaten in the preservation era by 92203 Black Prince at Merehead, but over a much shorter distance and with stock fitted with rollerbearing axleboxes.

 

We are accustomed to the concept of heavy freight being the preserve of 8-coupled engines with sub-5' driving wheels, at least in the UK, and of express freight being that of mixed traffic locos with driving wheels of around the 5'8"-6' ballpark.  The general recieved wisdom after the outbreak of WW2 seems to have favoured driving wheels of just over 6', usually 6'2", which had featured on Gresleys very successful V2s and were repeated on LNER, Southern, and BR Standard pacifics of the period (and the 5MT, which were intended as fast heavy mixed traffic locos and were not unsuccessful in that role, though admittedly you'd rarely have seen a Merchant Navy on anything other than a top link passenger duty...

 

As bearings and lubrication improved, a factor at least as influential in designing steam locomotives as the heating surface or shape of the firebox, it became possible, while not perhaps desireable, to achieve running speeds that were very high by the standards of the day with the 5' driving wheels of 9Fs, which proved this with exploits on the ECML and with Evening Star on the 'Red Dragon'.  These locos were very successful on the S & DJ with heavy expresses and easily up to the 70mph required.

 

All of which suggests that some of our 'accepted wisdom' about wheel arrangements, driving wheel sizes, and overall locomotive size is, perhaps, rooted to too great an extent in the practices of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, which is when the CMEs that designed the engines of the middle of the century cut their teeth and learned their prejudices; big wheels = high speed and low piston speed, small wheels = ability to pull heavy loads at low speed.  One can view the first quarter of the twentieth century as a struggle to cope with the large diameter boilers, big outside cylinders, and wide fireboxes needed to deal with the higher loads and faster timings that the Traffic Department needed.

 

Some CMEs did better in this game than others; Churchward and Gresley seem to have understood it well enough, but Drummond on the LSW struggled a bit and was clearly happier with inside cylinder 4-4-0s.  Others fall somewhere between these two stools, or didn't bother (the Cambrian, Furness, Great North of Scotland, for example, were turning out brand new designs that were effectivel 1880s Victorian inside cylinder 4-4-0s as late as 1921, when they would have been better served by moguls as had been proven on the GN, GW, and SECR).

 

So, in the UK, an 8-coupled loco was for half a century the default heavy slow hauler, and given the speed required for mineral and all bar the few express freights this was understandable and the persistence of the short wheelbase loose coupled wagon ensured that it would continue to be so.  Gresley, aided and abetted to no mean extent, had a go at something faster with the P2s, but they were a bit of a flash in the pan.  Bear in mind that our steam CMEs were pretty small c conservative as a rule, and were happy to continue with inside cylinder 0-6-0s for secondary mixed traffic work, 'goods' engines in the Victorian sense, into the 1930s, when, again, small moguls might have been better!

 

If you compare this to US 'superpower', which I take to mean engines beyond the capacity of human stoking, one sees massive beasts culminating in the UP's Challengers and BIg Boys, capable of hauling huge trains of roller-bearinged bogie stock over long single track sections at high speeds.  It is understandable that this awe-inspiring practice should be touted by enthusiasts for UK work, and much speculation and 'what if' is done on threads such as this, and is good fun.  We've seen Stanier 'Coronation' and BR Standard 9F style Mallets, A4 based 4-8-4s, and all manner of Garratts, none of which would have ever stood a chance of ever being built.  4-8-0s come up now and then as potential fast mixed traffic engines, but the 9F based 2-8-2 would have been better as you can incorporate a wide bottomed firebox that will burn sh*t coal. 

 

The 9F is sometimes touted as the ultimate UK locomotive design, and there is a good bit of justification for this; it was simply built and scrapped a decade too early.  By the late 60s, after steam finished, block air braked oil, MGR, Freightliner, and other trains were becoming more common, and the default speed of most of them was 60mph, and they could run at this or the 75mph required for Freightliners for long distances in the post-Beeching world of reduced traffic.  They would have been ideal for most of the work I was involved with in the 70s.  Had the dieselisation of the 1955 modernisation plan not taken place for some reason, the faster freight work done by Type 4 diesels would have been grist to the 9F mill, and they'd have been capable of more or less everything else on the main line as well; perhaps a few DoG based 3-cylinder 4-8-4s with mechanical stoking and 6'2" wheels for very fast passenger work.

 

The 9Fs, and any other surviving steam for that matter, might have been further improved with Chapelon/Porta devices of various type and roller bearing motion; 92250 was given a Giesl ejector double chimney, so clearly somebody though more could have been got out of them.  I like the idea of them fitted with 4-character headcode boxes fore and aft, perhaps split and mounted on the inner side of the smoke deflectors low enough for the smokebox door to clear them, in Monastral Blue with yellow buffer beams.  Please, no full yellow ends; they are not needed on steam engines.

[tythatguy1312]

Speaking of the 9F's, I've actively looked into what COULD be done to edge out even more improvement, and I'm left believing all you could do is slap roller bearings on every single rotation point outside the cab, allowing them to run faster and further without risking a hot box. As for the Franco-Crosti 9F's, I doubt they offered much more efficiency for their additional costs.

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

The 9F is sometimes touted as the ultimate UK locomotive design, and there is a good bit of justification for this; it was simply built and scrapped a decade too early.  By the late 60s, after steam finished, block air braked oil, MGR, Freightliner, and other trains were becoming more common, and the default speed of most of them was 60mph, and they could run at this or the 75mph required for Freightliners for long distances in the post-Beeching world of reduced traffic.  They would have been ideal for most of the work I was involved with in the 70s.  Had the dieselisation of the 1955 modernisation plan not taken place for some reason, the faster freight work done by Type 4 diesels would have been grist to the 9F mill, and they'd have been capable of more or less everything else on the main line as well; perhaps a few DoG based 3-cylinder 4-8-4s with mechanical stoking and 6'2" wheels for very fast passenger work.

 

The 9Fs, and any other surviving steam for that matter, might have been further improved with Chapelon/Porta devices of various type and roller bearing motion; 92250 was given a Giesl ejector double chimney, so clearly somebody though more could have been got out of them.  I like the idea of them fitted with 4-character headcode boxes fore and aft, perhaps split and mounted on the inner side of the smoke deflectors low enough for the smokebox door to clear them, in Monastral Blue with yellow buffer beams.  Please, no full yellow ends; they are not needed on steam engines.

You're quite right about the 9Fs and how suitable they would have been for even some of the more "modern" freight, although that wasn't the image BR would have wanted to get across.  However, much of the waste of dieselisation (in hindsight) was allocating the new machines to the remaining traffics that they were no better suited to and in some cases, worse, such as the short-distance coal traffic in the South Wales Valleys and West Yorkshire, where neither collieries nor power-stations were modified for MGR working; unbraked wagons survived in big numbers until the early 80s.  There is a good argument that you can't maintain two lots of infrastructure for steam and diesel, but it's not as if DMUs and freight locos tended to share the same depot anyway.  The outcome would have been the same by the 84-85 miners' strike, when the traffic evaporated, but it would have allowed the locomotives to have been written down over a reasonable period.  It would have also allowed the redundancy payments to so many loco crew, to be spread over a much longer period which would have created much less resentment, although that assumes that ASLEF/NUR would have accepted that there was a long term plan to reduce their potential membership.....

[eldomtom2]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

If you compare this to US 'superpower', which I take to mean engines beyond the capacity of human stoking, one sees massive beasts culminating in the UP's Challengers and BIg Boys, capable of hauling huge trains of roller-bearinged bogie stock over long single track sections at high speeds.

Though, of course, whether or not such massive locomotives were actually good value for money for the railroads has also been questioned.

[adanapress]

How about the Met -Camm equivalent to the Class 120.    A class 101 single car double ended. Easy to do from the Triang Hornby models with a saw and some adhesive ...

[AlfaZagato]

As has been breached before, loop lengths & rolling stock design precluded much impetuous for larger locos than we received.   Even Continental practice would be an improvement on rolling stock.   Volume was there for it, too.   Lots of customers who didn't want to upgrade though.

 

Loops would be harder to approach.   Probably exaggerating, but y'all don't seem to have enough space to extend your loops by all too much.   

[JimC]

The other factor with US style locomotives is weight. Its all very well if you have endless prairies and few bridges, but those monsters were *heavy* - axle loading on the notorious Big Boy was 30 tons if Wikipedia is correct and I've done the calc to Imperial tons correctly. Not going to take that across many UK bridges. I think that's another way the Garratt scores over the Mallet types. 

[The Johnster]

1 hour ago, tythatguy1312 said:

As for the Franco-Crosti 9F's, I doubt they offered much more efficiency for their additional costs.

BR seem to have come to the same conclusion, but kudos to them for trying!  The F-C locos were rated at 8F IIRC, which makes one question what the benefits were, presumably in terms of warming up time or disposal because there were clearly no advantages out on the road.

 

I am not sufficiently versed in the minutae of valve gear to comment on whether or not Britihs Caprotti valve gear would have made a difference; anecdotal evidence suggest that it improved the Ivatt and Standard 5MTs that were fitted with it by 'about a coach', but presumably there was a reason for it not being fitted to all the Standard 5MTs or retrofitted to the Black 5s.

 

1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

It would have also allowed the redundancy payments to so many loco crew, to be spread over a much longer period which would have created much less resentment, although that assumes that ASLEF/NUR would have accepted that there was a long term plan to reduce their potential membership.....

 

ASLEF were much more militant than the NUR in the 70s, under the leadership of Ray Buckton, who was archetypical of the Union bullyboy portrayed in press cartoons and seemed incapable of normal speech, treating everything he said as valid grounds for 'committeespeak'.  This was at a time when staff morale on the railways was at an all-time low, the men reeling from several years of Beeching closures, new working practices which, as well as precipitating massive redundancies, challenged the status quo and the line of promotion practices of the footplate grades in particular.  Many footplate staff had seen their hopes of returning to home sheds from which they had been transferred during the war put back for many years or destroyed altogether, so Ray had plenty of genuine dissatisfaction to fuel his incomprehensible rantings.  The future seemed to offer nothing but more and more stringent of the same.

 

But I think that it is probable that anything that slowed the redundancies and eased the shock of the decade that followed Beeching would have been more acceptable to the unions.   Matters came to a head when BR wanted to single man diesel and electric loco jobs (it had been done for years on electric and, later, diesel multiple units) and, at almost the same time, remove brake vans from fully fitted freight trains and position the guard in the rear cab of the loco.  NUR men not in the footplate line of promotion aboard locos; this was a step too far for many, and there was considerable resentment when it was introduced.

 

It was at this point (1970) that I thought it would be a good idea to take up a job as a freight guard at Canton.  I was young, sported a generally hippy-ish appearance, and straight off the street into a job that would, a decade earlier, only have been available to men with considerable experience in railway work, especially shunting.  The drivers were, some of them, highly dismissive and I and those who started in the job at the same time as me had considerable resentment to deal with, which was none of our making, and on top of this had to prove ourselves capable and reliable in the job, which if I'm honest some of us didn't, not including myself among that number and they didn't help the cause much.

 

Overlay retention of steam for block and other freight on top of this, and you have a different situation.  No single manning for steam freight jobs, and where does the guard ride on a fully fitted train hauled by a steam loco (or a double headed class 20 hauled MGR for that matter).  When guards were included in 'traincrew', and road on locomotives, acting as secondman for light engine moves between the depot and the yard the train was to originate from, they began to book on and off duty at loco depots or signing on points, not goods yards, and presumably this could not have happened with steam locomotives, so another way of working would have had to have been devised.  On steam jobs, this is obvious but there would have certainly been some freight jobs that were diesel hauled, and probably all the passenger jobs.  On a fully fitted single manned diesel or electric hauled freight train, the guard could not sign on at the goods depot or yard and must sign on duty at the loco depot, or ride in a van.

 

All of which would have provided good arguments for the unions to resist some of the working methods that were introduced in the late 60s, or at least delay them for perhaps another decade.  By that time, the HST revolution had occurred and the relentless tide of decline of railways was beginning to turn.  Traffic grew as a result of motorway congestion and continued to do so until Covid hit, and may resume the upward trend, morale is much better, and the threat of redundancy less prevalent, which must have all had a beneficial effect in general on industrial relations in the industry, and though we still have some problems occasionally, they tend to more about manning levels and conditions than to protect vulnerable jobs.

[tythatguy1312]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

but presumably there was a reason for it not being fitted to all the Standard 5MTs or retrofitted to the Black 5s.

with the Standard 5's I suspect that was to keep its parts in common with the 4mt, Clan and Britannia. As for the Black 5's, I'm inclined to believe the sheer, daunting scale of rebuilding over 800 locos that were already perfectly fine is why the Caprotti black 5's remained a Minority.

[Mike 84C]

Ray Buckton did nothing to help raise the morale of his members, I was an  ASLEF member and as far as he was concerned Firemen/Secondmen were totally disposable. He was an oaf. if moderators wish to remove this post or edit please feel free but it wont change my view.

  I was at Bescot for a while and that was a mixed NUR/ASLEF footplate grade depot,things could be a little unpleasant with an influx of  ASLEF men from all over the midlands and beyond right up into the Manchester area. I lived for a few years in the hostel in Wolverhampton and by heck there was a real variety of men there! And all of the above for £14.40 for a 42 hr week.

  Sorry gone a bit off subject  😎

[PhilJ W]

5 minutes ago, Mike 84C said:

Ray Buckton did nothing to help raise the morale of his members, I was an  ASLEF member and as far as he was concerned Firemen/Secondmen were totally disposable. He was an oaf. if moderators wish to remove this post or edit please feel free but it wont change my view.

  I was at Bescot for a while and that was a mixed NUR/ASLEF footplate grade depot,things could be a little unpleasant with an influx of  ASLEF men from all over the midlands and beyond right up into the Manchester area. I lived for a few years in the hostel in Wolverhampton and by heck there was a real variety of men there! And all of the above for £14.40 for a 42 hr week.

  Sorry gone a bit off subject  😎

In most industries the unions were their own worst enemies.

[The Johnster]

2 hours ago, Mike 84C said:

Ray Buckton did nothing to help raise the morale of his members, I was an  ASLEF member and as far as he was concerned Firemen/Secondmen were totally disposable. He was an oaf.

Preaching to the choir, Mike.  Many of the locomen I worked with were reasonably intelligent characters who could manage a sentence in the English language that a listener could comprehend reasonably well, but Buckton's ramblings were barely decipherable, and it amazed me that he had managed to attain a position of authority and leadership; his standard of politcal debate (a thing one would have thought a basic essential for a political career as leader of a major trade union, having to deal with top management, tv and press journalists, and high ranking government officials) was, frankly, abysmal.

[tythatguy1312]

21 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Buckton's ramblings were barely decipherable, and it amazed me that he had managed to attain a position of authority and leadership

yeah this is Britain, nobody discriminates against speech impediments because half of them are indistinguishable from genuine accents

[JimC]

9 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

In most industries the unions were their own worst enemies.

I think we are on very dubious territory here as well as being way off topic.  To my mind the curse of the unions is that it seems to me that the only people who would put in the hard yards and do the important work that union officers do were politically extreme activists who regarded major industrial action as a success rather than a failure. 

[TerryD1471]

20 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

going by tractive effort and sheer size, the single biggest was the LNER U1, followed up by the LMS' own Garratts and the BR Standard class 9F. Although the other ones are all undeniably large, they're not really in the same ballpark as those monsters

It's interesting how many people think the 9F was a large loco. It was undoubtedly superb, and its TE was almost as high as most Class 8 passenger locos. HOWEVER, it was actually smaller than a Britannia and even than a Clan pacific. The Clan was just fractionally longer and heavier. Strange but true! Check it out in your Ian Allan combined volume! The 9F was just over 86 tons.

 

Another bizarre factoid brought to my notice recently was that the heaviest pre-nationalisation (non-articulated) freight loco wasn't even an 8-coupled machine. The Southern S15 was heavier than any GW/LMS/LNE/WD 2-8-0s, most of which weighed in at well under 80 tons. Even the WD 2-10-0 was lighter.

 

If we want to choose the heaviest non-artic UK steam locos we have to look at the big passenger engines, many of which turned the scales at around 105 tons.

 

OK, I've finished being a "smart-ar*e" now!

[The Lurker]

The LSWR G16 (4-8-0T hump shunter) and H16 tanks (4-6-2T cross London freight) were pretty heavy too, around 95 / 96 tons

[The Johnster]

12 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

yeah this is Britain, nobody discriminates against speech impediments because half of them are indistinguishable from genuine accents

In Ray Buckton's case, it wasn't so much speech impediment or accent, he could enunciate reasonably clearly, but what he enunciated was somewhat removed from normal vernacular English usage, a sort of committeespeak in which he constantly referred to mandates and referral to working parties and subcommittees. One wondered how he ordered breakfast in a cafe...

 

'I'm mandated by the area sub-committee's resolution at conference to discuss the acceptance of toast and marmalade, subject to ratification by the working party terms and conditions sub-group's confirmation of the previous resolution, taken by the steering committee of the sub-group'.  You could understand the individual words clearly enough, but the meaning was somewhat obscure and you were rapidly losing the will to live.

[RedGemAlchemist]

On 02/04/2022 at 21:08, tythatguy1312 said:

courtesy of the guy who compiled seemingly all the commonly known info on that thing,
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/francocrosti/francocrosti.htm#b

I swear Douglas Self's site wills these locomotives into existence. There's so much stuff on there that prior to him writing about them I didn't even know existed.

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

In Ray Buckton's case, it wasn't so much speech impediment or accent, he could enunciate reasonably clearly, but what he enunciated was somewhat removed from normal vernacular English usage, a sort of committeespeak in which he constantly referred to mandates and referral to working parties and subcommittees. One wondered how he ordered breakfast in a cafe...

 

'I'm mandated by the area sub-committee's resolution at conference to discuss the acceptance of toast and marmalade, subject to ratification by the working party terms and conditions sub-group's confirmation of the previous resolution, taken by the steering committee of the sub-group'.  You could understand the individual words clearly enough, but the meaning was somewhat obscure and you were rapidly losing the will to live.

You could imagine the look on the faces of the others in the queue, when the proprietor asked him, "Certainly Sir, would you like a cup of tea with that? Milk and sugar?".