Imaginary Locomotives

[DenysW]

22 hours ago, The Johnster said:

increasing the power and steam raising capacity available from the boilers and making the steam and exhaust passages as efficient as possible (this is what Chapelon and Porta were about

Chapelon possibly, and successfully, but Porta also worked on changing the combustion chemistry of the coal, and the corrosion/scaling chemistry of the water. My understanding of Porta's combustion claims is that if you add steam into the feed, primary, air you convert the bed of coal to performing partial gasification, allowing it to operate at below clinker temperatures. The gasification produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen that are then burnt above the bed of coal (with extra, secondary, air) to give the same net energy, but cleaner.

 

I could see this as being successful at steady state, but a complexity and start-up nightmare. 

 

The water chemistry changes just looked like they needed a cost/benefit analysis of doing the elaborate preparation at all water stops versus the longer times between blowdowns.

[toby_tl10]

19 hours ago, rockershovel said:

I've always felt that with the notable exception of the HST 125,  the mistake was in dieselising AT ALL, rather than continuing with steam until electrification was carried out. 

That's a bit too ideal isn't it? You can't electrify absolutely every line. Look at the number of non-electrified lines today, many lines are simply uneconomical to electrify.

 

You need something to run those lines, and you need something when the overhead wires are down. Steam or HST don't seem to be the solution, so you still need diesel locomotives and DMUs in reality.

[rockershovel]

9 minutes ago, toby_tl10 said:

That's a bit too ideal isn't it? You can't electrify absolutely every line. Look at the number of non-electrified lines today, many lines are simply uneconomical to electrify.

 

You need something to run those lines, and you need something when the overhead wires are down. Steam or HST don't seem to be the solution, so you still need diesel locomotives and DMUs in reality.

Well yes, I suppose so. It's a depressing thought that the motley selection of 2-4  car DMUs that clatter about between the ECML and East Coast, in ephemeral liveries resembling those obscure brands of fizzy pop sold in chip shops are the best tool for the job, but at least they aren't Pacers ....

Edited November 2, 2022 by rockershovel

[john new]

36 minutes ago, toby_tl10 said:

That's a bit too ideal isn't it? You can't electrify absolutely every line. Look at the number of non-electrified lines today, many lines are simply uneconomical to electrify.

 

You need something to run those lines, and you need something when the overhead wires are down. Steam or HST don't seem to be the solution, so you still need diesel locomotives and DMUs in reality.

But if they had electrified, with three rail power, less opportunities for wires down incidents. The Southern, and later BR(S) got lots right. The Cl 33 4TCs for Weymouth and other beyond the electrified sections a case in point.

[Northmoor]

On 01/11/2022 at 18:20, The Johnster said:

It wasn't steam or even Cox's compromised Rugby data that caused the failure of the 1955 plan's loco policy, and it is worth pointing out at this stage of the discussion that the 1955 plan was highly effective and successful at modernising the railway despite the adverse economic conditions it was about to face.  The development of Motorways and effective heavy road haulage in the following decade tested the railway's resilience to the extreme, and it's survival is in a large part a result of the Plan's views on fast goods, intermodals, air brakes, electric heating, CWR, and MAS; don't forget that.  It was the loco policy and it's requirements for underpowered and ineffective diesels, some of which were seriously problematic when it came to reliability and availability, and the arguably unpredictable unreliability of Treasury funding for the electrifications that should have had all main lines done by 1980 that was at fault, though I would maintain that the faulted Rugby data can be held at least partially responsible.

I do wonder if on this thread we're all returning to our own biased view that it was a conspiracy that got rid of steam?  Reliability problems aside - and not all the Pilot Scheme types were unreliable - perhaps the BRB took the view that it didn't matter that the new diesels couldn't keep to the schedule of a Duchess on Load 14, for instance.  What was important was that the diesel could run Euston to Glasgow return then get to Manchester by the end of a day, the Duchess could do barely half that.  More expensive the new locos might have been, but you needed far fewer of them.

There was also the issue that the railways were really struggling to recruit cleaners and other shed staff who would work up to being drivers, but working in a warm, dry cab (so the owners manual said anyway) or a bright new depot on the New Railway, was more appealing to new recruits who'd never considered working for BR before.

 

What the BRB took far too long to realise - arguably not until the 1980s - that the solution wasn't to keep adding coaches to already very long trains, but to run to increased frequency and preferably with "clockface departures".  Convenience sells even more than speed and on long journeys with more than one change, improved service frequency can save hours, not just minutes, even if each individual stage takes longer than with steam haulage.

[Flying Pig]

3 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

I do wonder if on this thread we're all returning to our own biased view that it was a conspiracy that got rid of steam?  Reliability problems aside - and not all the Pilot Scheme types were unreliable - perhaps the BRB took the view that it didn't matter that the new diesels couldn't keep to the schedule of a Duchess on Load 14, for instance.  What was important was that the diesel could run Euston to Glasgow return then get to Manchester by the end of a day, the Duchess could do barely half that.  More expensive the new locos might have been, but you needed far fewer of them.

There was also the issue that the railways were really struggling to recruit cleaners and other shed staff who would work up to being drivers, but working in a warm, dry cab (so the owners manual said anyway) or a bright new depot on the New Railway, was more appealing to new recruits who'd never considered working for BR before.

 

What the BRB took far too long to realise - arguably not until the 1980s - that the solution wasn't to keep adding coaches to already very long trains, but to run to increased frequency and preferably with "clockface departures".  Convenience sells even more than speed and on long journeys with more than one change, improved service frequency can save hours, not just minutes, even if each individual stage takes longer than with steam haulage.

 

But...but...but you seem to be saying that railways are not just about locomotives!  What heresy is this?

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, Flying Pig said:

But...but...but you seem to be saying that railways are not just about locomotives!  What heresy is this?

 

Nasty smelly dirty revenue-consuming things. Give me carriages and wagons any day!

[AlfaZagato]

We had a thread for that.

 

It died after circular notions about how SWB PO wagons were the bane of operating existence.

 

You English needed to slap your coal industry in the face and tell them to line up 30 years earlier than you did.

[Compound2632]

17 minutes ago, AlfaZagato said:

You English needed to slap your coal industry in the face and tell them to line up 30 years earlier than you did.

 

Modelling of British railways before the second world war would be very dull if we had to trade in all our colourful 8 / 10 / 12-ton PO wagons for 40-ton gondolas!

[Flying Pig]

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Modelling of British railways before the second world war would be very dull if we had to trade in all our colourful 8 / 10 / 12-ton PO wagons for 40-ton gondolas!

 

 

The coal trade was flush with much cash before the Great War, which was also the era in which the railways were beginning to push for bigger wagons.  With adequate persuasion we might have seen PO steel hoppers and a boom in the signwriting industry.  Imagine a train of them behind a Lanky 2-10-0.

 

[The Johnster]

More than 30 years, Alfa, we needed to slap 'em into line the same time as you colonial gentlemen sensibly adopted bogie air braked vehicles with Janney couplers as standard nationwide!

[AlfaZagato]

Yeah, that was, what the 1880's, at least?

[toby_tl10]

5 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Modelling of British railways before the second world war would be very dull if we had to trade in all our colourful 8 / 10 / 12-ton PO wagons for 40-ton gondolas!

Not all. The LMS built 30 40-ton coal hoppers in 1929 which regularly ran with 4-wheeled PO wagons.

 

Imagine if LMS, LNER and GWR each built 100 bogie coal hoppers to their own design. Wouldn't that be even more interesting for the modelling scene?

[Compound2632]

4 hours ago, toby_tl10 said:

Not all. The LMS built 30 40-ton coal hoppers in 1929 which regularly ran with 4-wheeled PO wagons.

 

Imagine if LMS, LNER and GWR each built 100 bogie coal hoppers to their own design. Wouldn't that be even more interesting for the modelling scene?

 

In the very early years of the 20th century there was widespread experimentation with 30-ton bogie mineral wagons - the Caledonian, Midland, and Great Western among others. The Midland had 70 in total, bought between 1902 and 1905. The Leeds Forge Co., under the brand name Pressed Steel, was in the forefront here, having been supplying similar wagons to colonial railways. These big wagons ended up in use for loco coal on the Midland and the Great Western, IIRC the Caledonian used them in block trains conveying imported iron ore to steelworks.

Edited November 3, 2022 by Compound2632
Corrected name of firm to Leeds Forge; Pressed Steel was their brand name.

[rockershovel]

I don't see why any "conspiracy to end steam" is required. Occam's Razor applies. 

 

An ill-advised obsession with an incompletely visualised modernity was widespread in the 1950s. The motorways programme predicated a wholesale shift to an internal-combustion driven economy. The move towards housing stock renewal and the Clean Air legislation pointed to the decline of Old King Coal. Atomic power couldn't drive steam locomotives. 

 

Anyway, how are you going to keep them down on the farm, now that they've seen Paree? My father and his contemporaries returned from the ruins of Europe having driven on motorways, seen main-line electric trains; they'd seen American films about diesel locomotives and German workers social housing. 

 

There would be no return to the past. 

[billbedford]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

In the very early years of the 20th century there was widespread experimentation with 30-ton bogie mineral wagons - the Caledonian, Midland, and Great Western among others. The Midland had 70 in total, bought between 1902 and 1905. 

Most of these wagons were not hoppers. AFAIK only the ones supplied to the GNR and NER were hoppers. The GNR ones were sent to France during WW1, but the NER ones lasted till the end of steam. 

Edited November 3, 2022 by billbedford

[DenysW]

6 hours ago, toby_tl10 said:

The LMS built 30 40-ton coal hoppers in 1929

Which they could do, successfully, because they were the customer for the coal at Stonebridge Park, not just its transport agency. It wasn't part of an effort to change a very reluctant industry, although they probably hoped they were setting an example for the National Grid.

[JimC]

I submit that another factor in bringing about the end of steam was cleanliness. With more and more jobs being indoors and clean passengers were increasingly moving away from the perceived - and actually - filthy railway in favour of transport where you didn't get soot smuts. To my mind 'self-cleaning' smokeboxes were a major own goal. 

[The Johnster]

Not just passengers, Jim; recruitment for railway jobs became an issue for early BR.  New factories offered cleaner shift work with better conditions and much better pay; railway work was filthy, involved starting and finishing at all sorts of odd times, and the working conditions, I mean the cabins, bothies, and messrooms, were mostly pathetic, Victorian afterthoughts.  Who’s going to leave school and start loco grades as a cleaner signing on duty at 01.00 in a filthy engine shed on a freezing winter morning or in pouring rain when your mate works in a factory, has proper shifts, stays warm and dry, a nice subsidised canteen serving hot fresh food, comes home clean, has more money, and is off duty on Saturday night and can get the girls, including yours…
 

Getting rid of steam addressed at least some of those issues, but by that time the dead men’s shoes method of promotion and mass redundancies had made progression through the footplate grades slower than continental drift, unless you moved to London to work on Southern Region who were always short of traincrew, but the London weighting allowance nowhere near covered the area’s housing costs.  Railways were at a low ebb morale-wise and not seen as a secure future after the redundancies of the Beeching era; there were still secure futures in those day, difficult as that might be for modern school-leavers to envisage.  
 

If you didn’t like your job, you simply walked off it in the morning and had a better one in the afternoon, which meant that making your work attractive to the labour market was easier with diesel and electric locomotives than with steam, but the railway’s unsocial hours, slow promotion in the footplate grades, and low pay always hindered recruitment.  The unions accepted low basic pay because it protected their existing members against redundancy and opposed recruitment because it reduced the availability of the overtime their depended on to make a living wage, which was largely acceptable to management because it was cheaper than paying a decent basic living wage and having proper staffing levels, and the men were willing to accept the overtime and complicit in the ‘deal’.  This was widespread across industry, not just the railway. 

Edited November 3, 2022 by The Johnster

[AlfaZagato]

Still is in the US.   Our railway unions had some sort of trick deal going, though.   I've been told tales of five crew on a double, killing a case to a man on a 8-hour shift.

[The Johnster]

Managers like overtime, even at enhanced rates.  It is a flexible and adaptive means of being able to man the jobs even at short notice, and cheaper overall than proper full manning levels when training and admin overheads are taken into account.  And it can be used as a whip to keep the staff in line, or to get poor basic wage offers accepted. 
 

Unions like overtime as well, prompted by their members who regard it as a means to increase a meagre basic income, and resist recruitment and new manning arrangements that threaten it.  
 

Nobody addressed the elephant in the room, which wad that if proper staffing levels were to enable overtime to be largely eliminated (there’ll always be unforeseen emergencies), the unions would have more support from their members and a better argument for negotiating better rates of basic pay, which would be beneficial in terms of stress, family relations, a

nd better industrial relations.  In the Britain of the 60s and 70s, no chance, greed ruled, in the 80s and 90s greed was good and there was no such thing as society, so recession hit with the perfect storm of low basic wages and no overtime to boost them; some might say everybody got what they deserved as a result of previous greed and short term thinking, but not everybody did, and in some parts of the country people who were of a particularly acquisitive nature brcame very wealthy while the majority became significantly less so.  This is one (and not the only one) of the ways we Boomers screwed things up for Millennials.  

[Northmoor]

A previous employer of mine paid the first five hours of overtime at Zero Rate.  I was also told at an early stage that we should all expect to work 10% more than the contracted hours (that's a whole afternoon each week, for free).  Funnily enough this expectation wasn't mentioned during recruitment.

 

I didn't stay for very long.

[PhilJ W]

1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

A previous employer of mine paid the first five hours of overtime at Zero Rate.  I was also told at an early stage that we should all expect to work 10% more than the contracted hours (that's a whole afternoon each week, for free).  Funnily enough this expectation wasn't mentioned during recruitment.

 

I didn't stay for very long.

That was quite common practice up until the fifties in certain trades. But as there became more vacancies than people to fill them towards the end of the decade those employers found themselves without any staff.

[AlfaZagato]

Back to imaginary locomotives.   An idea I know we've covered before, with no point other than it sounded neat.

 

A King-class Mountain tank.  Call it the Queen class.   Maybe for heavy London expresses?

[AlfaZagato]

Very quick math shows just under a 15-ton axle loading with two added axles to make a Hudson/Baltic.   That, of course, doesn't account for the weight of extended frames, bunker, water, or the new trailing bogie itself.   Is it known how much a GWR bogie weighs?