Imaginary Locomotives

[john new]

11 minutes ago, DenysW said:

Well we know he wouldn't because he didn't.

 

My feeling is that this was still firmly in the days of empirical rules-of-thumb, and you made no changes without either a really good economic reason or a hefty dose of arrogance (Brunel). Stephenson's first locomotive was tested on a tramway (his employer) at the tramway's gauge. It worked, so no change for his next (Stockton & Darlington) that was to be dual worked with horse-driven for passengers, and steam-driven for coal. Still more reason not to change. Similarly with a speculative railway enterprise's choice of engineer. Pick one with a proven track record - Stephenson and his trainees.

Fully agree although you have missed out Hackworth and also GS's system at Hetton - 200th anniversary is current.

 

Edited November 21, 2022 by john new

[Jeremy Cumberland]

1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

Now here's a serious What If....?

 

George Stephenson had settled on 3ft gauge as adequate for the traffic around the Durham coalfield and it had evolved to become Standard Gauge.  Would the rest of the Western World have followed or gone larger and would that have been something other than 4'8.5"?

 

A National network of 3ft gauge wouldn't have necessarily counted against heavy loads (look at South Africa with Cape gauge) but what is the highest speed on a similar gauge elsewhere in the world?  I can't think of any high speed metre gauge networks.

 

Adequate for the traffic is one thing, but would he have been happy with designing locomtives for that gauge? Perhaps the Killingworth locomotives would be viable at 3 ft gauge, although I can imagine stability becoming a concern, but can you really imagine a locomotive like Locomotion on 3 ft gauge?

 

This was, as far as I am aware, before the invention of the multiple tube boiler, and long before the invention of the expansion link, so both boiler and engine efficiencies would have been very low, necessitating large boilers for increasingly heavier trains. I suspect that if early railways had been narrower gauge, then by the mid-1820s necessity would have forced the adoption of something like a 4'6" or 5 ft gauge.

[AlfaZagato]

Would the UK loading gauge have increased with a wider track gauge, though?  Brunelian gauge notwithstanding, y'all didn't do much to stretch the space available from the 1850s.   If 5ft had been adapted in place of 4'8.5", would the existing UK loading be the nominal 3.5" wider, too? 

[JimC]

3 hours ago, Northmoor said:

George Stephenson had settled on 3ft gauge as adequate for the traffic around the Durham coalfield

My understanding is that the existing plateways etc round the NE coalfields were around 4'6, 4'8. Around the SW/S Wales, apparent;y, they were typiczlly around 4'0, similarly the Surrey Iron Railway and Pen Y Darren. So a 4' gauge could have easily happened. 

[Northmoor]

14 minutes ago, JimC said:

My understanding is that the existing plateways etc round the NE coalfields were around 4'6, 4'8. Around the SW/S Wales, apparent;y, they were typiczlly around 4'0, similarly the Surrey Iron Railway and Pen Y Darren. So a 4' gauge could have easily happened. 

This was my point, what if the existing gauge had been about 3' and not near 4'8"?  

[DavidB-AU]

1 hour ago, JimC said:

My understanding is that the existing plateways etc round the NE coalfields were around 4'6, 4'8. 

 

Stephenson himself said that in hindsight he would have chosen a gauge "a few inches larger - but only a very few".

[PhilJ W]

Both South Africa and New Zealand have a similar or even larger loading gauge than the UK and both on 3' 6" gauge so a narrower gauge than standard would not necessarily have been a problem either in the UK or on the Continent. The USA with their generous loading gauge is a different matter. Up until the American Civil War American Railroads had a multiplicity of gauges which didn't matter as many were isolated from one another. When the civil war started the Union government realised that the railroads (75% were in their  territory) would be a military asset and set about connecting them up. The majority of the lines were standard gauge but quite a few were to five foot gauge as was the majority in the Confederate states. During the war the Union changed many of the broad gauge lines to standard but very few lines in the Southern states connected with each other and after the civil war were converted to standard and connected to other lines. Many American lines adopted five foot gauge as standard gauge was considered to be unstable. If standard gauge was four foot or less it's possible that the USA would have had five foot gauge as their standard. 

[rodent279]

9 hours ago, AlfaZagato said:

Would the UK loading gauge have increased with a wider track gauge, though?  Brunelian gauge notwithstanding, y'all didn't do much to stretch the space available from the 1850s.   If 5ft had been adapted in place of 4'8.5", would the existing UK loading be the nominal 3.5" wider, too? 

We're  straying into Imaginary Railways territory here, and I know the "What if Brunel had won and 7ft gauge become UK standard" has already been done enough times.

But why exactly do we in the UK have a smaller loading gauge than our friends on the European mainland? Were railways across la Manche built to a larger gauge from the start, if so, what prompted them to do so?

[Ramblin Rich]

It always seems like Britain built to the smallest size to reduce civil engineering - see also Brindley's narrow canals with tiny tunnels.

[Ramblin Rich]

It always seems like Britain built to the smallest size to reduce civil engineering - see also Brindley's narrow canals with tiny tunnels. Being first meant a lot of methods were being tried out here. Once methods were established and builders were more confident, they could build bigger. But we were stuck with smaller structures because few companies were willing to spend large sums on enlarging existing tunnels and such like.

[DenysW]

50 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

Were railways across la Manche built to a larger gauge from the start, if so, what prompted them to do so?

The continental loading gauge was, my understanding, pretty variable as newly built. Imported British engineers used a small loading gauge (especially apparent in Normandy), others larger. Berne gauge was a compromise between the Germans (who'd mostly gone larger to start with) pushing for bigger, and the French not agreeing.

 

I've seen comments that Berne gauge (pre-WW1) was still being introduced on the French system in the late 1930s. We Brits are still gradually trying to introduce its modern equivalent over 100 years later - always reluctantly on cost grounds. It's never the right time to lift road bridges (see the latest excuse not to electrify north of Market Harborough),or to provide an extra bore on tunnels.

[DenysW]

1 hour ago, Ramblin Rich said:

It always seems like Britain built to the smallest size to reduce civil engineering

It's my understanding that the first British railways, which had the first choice of a flat route, and the best chance of having a profitable route (contrast L&Y first with MS&L second across the Pennines) had fairly generous civil engineering*. See the 1830/1840s discussions/haggling on converting the Liverpool-Birmingham Grand Junction route to Brunel Gauge and the, essentially negligible, incremental cost quoted for this. The paring away at costs comes in on the later, more marginal, routes like London-Hastings, where more of the cost is in tunnels.

 

*Mostly done by Stephenson and his acolytes. Locke not included in this comment.

[Compound2632]

21 minutes ago, DenysW said:

Locke not included in this comment.

 

Locke was responsible for more mileage than either the Stephensons or Brunel - the Grand Junction was effectively his and set his style, which was to avoid a summit tunnel at the expense of steeper gradients. Company directors quickly cottoned on to the fact that he got lines built more quickly and cheaply with less faff than anyone else (especially if they let the contracts to Brassey too) so started to see a better return on their investment sooner. I'm not sure what consequence this had for loading gauge, but it does seem to me that one can't leave him out of the discussion without weakening the point being made!

Edited November 22, 2022 by Compound2632

[billbedford]

14 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I can't think of any high-speed metre gauge networks.

 

The prototype Japanese Shinkansen were built for the Japanese standard 3'6" track. Though they weren't thought stable enough for higher speeds than 100mph. 

[Compound2632]

1 minute ago, billbedford said:

 

The prototype Japanese Shinkansen were built for the Japanese standard 3'6" track. Though they weren't thought stable enough for higher speeds than 100mph. 

 

So they moved to standard gauge - which they need not have done, having pretty well a clean slate. They could perfectly well have gone for, say, 5' 3" gauge. 

[billbedford]

14 hours ago, Northmoor said:

George Stephenson had settled on 3ft gauge as adequate for the traffic around the Durham coalfield and it had evolved to become Standard Gauge.  Would the rest of the Western World have followed or gone larger and would that have been something other than 4'8.5"?

 

The trucks of the very early North Eastern waggon ways were made by the local cartwrights who used the same basic dimensions as carts made for local farmers. These carts had to fit a horse between the shafts, which determined the overall width and that the wheels had a track of around 5 feet or a gauge of around 4'9". 

 

A thought experiment that used the same process to evolve a truck with a 3' gauge would have to postulate that the local farmers were using much smaller draught animals than horses, possibly goats. 

[billbedford]

15 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

So they moved to standard gauge - which they need not have done, having pretty well a clean slate. They could perfectly well have gone for, say, 5' 3" gauge. 

Possibly, 5'3" was a bastard gauge, decided by the Irish Parliament as a compromise between the standard 4'8.5" and the Indian 5'6" gauges. 

[DenysW]

 

3 hours ago, rodent279 said:

Were railways across la Manche built to a larger gauge

Just an anecdote* from Bavaria to show just how much the first railways bought their first few locomotives from Britain, thus setting the track gauge if not the loading gauge. The first Bavarian line, the Ludwigsbahn, which was more for passengers than freight, got a quote from George Stephenson for the locomotive, didn't like the price, and went local. When they went to place the order, they found that their slippery supplier had relocated from the Kingdom of Bavaria to the Kingdom/Empire of Austria to avoid honoring the quote. Gnashing of teeth and Adler supplied by Stephenson in 1835.

 

*Anecdote = seen on the net, not rigorously validated against reliable sources.

[PhilJ W]

17 minutes ago, billbedford said:

Possibly, 5'3" was a bastard gauge, decided by the Irish Parliament as a compromise between the standard 4'8.5" and the Indian 5'6" gauges. 

There were multiple gauges used in Ireland including standard gauge. When it came to consolidating the gauges it was decided to take an average of all the gauges used in Ireland and came up with 5' 3" which by coincidence is exactly 1.6 metres making conversion to metric simple. There was a line already in existence to that gauge in Germany. The gauge was decided by a British army engineer.

[PhilJ W]

45 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

So they moved to standard gauge - which they need not have done, having pretty well a clean slate. They could perfectly well have gone for, say, 5' 3" gauge. 

By then standard gauge was pretty universal so it was a slam dunk.

30 minutes ago, billbedford said:

A thought experiment that used the same process to evolve a truck with a 3' gauge would have to postulate that the local farmers were using much smaller draught animals than horses, possibly goats. 

Or donkeys, perhaps that explains why the 3 foot was popular in Ireland.

[rodent279]

56 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

So they moved to standard gauge - which they need not have done, having pretty well a clean slate. They could perfectly well have gone for, say, 5' 3" gauge. 

Is the Irish loading  gauge significantly larger than mainland UK? Would say an Irish GM diesel fit our railways if converted to standard gauge?

[PhilJ W]

6 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

Is the Irish loading  gauge significantly larger than mainland UK? Would say an Irish GM diesel fit our railways if converted to standard gauge?

Not signifectly so but I'm not aware of any enhancements for OHLE or container traffic. 

[JimC]

We really need a horse traction enthusiast on this thread, because I wonder if we could be recycling received wisdom. Horses are very variable in size, and sometimes used two abreast, but 4ft6ish seems quite big to me. Horse width seems not to be widely published on the net. 

 

On loading gauge, my guess is that it was realised fairly early on that the GB loading gauge was too small, but (again my guess) I wonder if high platforms are part of the story? Platform to vehicle clearance is a major limitation on the GB loading gauge, and seems to have been standardised fairly early. Once there are high platforms (how early did they come in?) expansion of the gauge is pretty much stuffed. 

[DenysW]

26 minutes ago, JimC said:

Once there are high platforms (how early did they come in?) expansion of the gauge is pretty much stuffed. 

Back in the day, yes. Tunnels a killer for loading gauge expansion cost as well, as well as over-bridges. Nowadays when electrickery is king and small motors are possible the solution seems to be that annoying retracable step that the tilting trains have to/choose to use. Then you can cut the high platforms back, but are still left with the bridges and tunnels.

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

By then standard gauge was pretty universal so it was a slam dunk.

 

Not necessarily. Japan is an archipelago with no very high prospect of creating a fixed link to continental Asia. So there was absolutely no external constraining factor on the choice of gauge for a high speed passenger network - they could have gone down the route of a maglev monorail.

Edited November 22, 2022 by Compound2632