UK 2ft Gauge 2-6-2's

[johnofwessex]

Excluding the Ffestiniog, as far as I can see there was only one very small group of 'modern' main line NG loco's, 4 different designs of 2-6-2 tanks.

 

The WHR's Rusell, the L&B Manning Wardles, and the two different design, one Davis & Metcalfe, the other GWR that ran on the Vale of Rheidol.

 

So how good were/are they?  The Davis & Metcalfe loco's are long gone as are the original Manning Wardles.

 

The ex GWR VofR loco's are impressive beasts, but I gather that the L&B loco's are not impressive.  I have no knowledge of Russell.

 

Can anyone comment?

[Dava]

Recommend a trip to Porthmadog & Aberystwyth to see for yourself. The VoR locos work hard on the climb to Devils Bridge. Replica L&B loco & Russell at Port. 
 

Dava

[PaulRhB]

41 minutes ago, johnofwessex said:

So how good were/are they?  The Davis & Metcalfe loco's are long gone as are the original Manning Wardles.

 

The ex GWR VofR loco's are impressive beasts, but I gather that the L&B loco's are not impressive.  I have no knowledge of Russell.

 

Lyd has shown that a few small improvements to the boiler make the basic design a very good loco. They did the job they were designed for and it’s a complement to that that the Southern mechanically copied it for Lew. The SR really only changed the ergonomic layout of the cab. The improvements on Lyd would have been easy to add later to upgrade the boiler pressure and add superheat as boilers needed replacing. 
 

 

Russell was just a modified version of their 0-6-2 industrial design with a front pony added to enhance running at higher passenger train speeds. It was a capable loco compared in contemporary accounts to the others and it survived while the Fairlies and Baldwin were cut up because it was more suitable for other applications. 

 

The VoR locos show what might have been if the L&B had survived, take the original basic good design and sort out the weaknesses and add lessons learnt in the meantime. They basically built new locos but they were just bigger for ‘modern’ traffic so adding weight with improvements mean you need stronger frames etc to deal with the load and power plus the technical refinements. 
 

Remember the Garratts on the modern WHR are just two 2-6-2’s strapped together so proving it’s an eminently good wheel arrangement for getting the power down around the tight curves with much larger modern trains 😉

[BernardTPM]

Russell was also very similar to the 2' 6" gauge Sierra Leone tanks. The first few (21-27) were smaller but from 28 onwards they had larger boilers and tanks. One of the late build ones (85) runs on the Welshpool & Lllanfair.

[PaulRhB]

Yes the SL tanks prove further that small evolutions to the basic design could have kept all those locos going if traffic increased to justify it. 
It’s possible the L&B locos may have lost the Joy valve gear and had walschaerts valve gear instead if they ever had a major rebuild but equally Lyd seems to prove that with more capacity in the boiler the Joy gear still works very well. 
The book on Lyd identifies the boiler’s steaming capacity as the main weak point of the L&B locos the rest of the design was largely original and they found the valve gear and riding far better than expected and suspect the reputation came from other locos poorly maintained rather than from the actual L&B locos. The nominal train lengths assigned to the FR locos are 12 for the Fairlies, Linda & Blanche 8 and Lyd was rated at 9 coaches on the FR compared to 4 on the L&B being a maximum load. 
So for the team that built Lyd the verdict was with a few improvements to the boiler design they would have been very capable indeed. Considering the SR didn’t feel the need to change it when they built Lew 27 years later it suggests they were still capable of dealing with the required traffic so maybe the reputations were rather misleading and came from biased opinion rather than fact?

[Jeremy Cumberland]

3 hours ago, johnofwessex said:

Excluding the Ffestiniog, as far as I can see there was only one very small group of 'modern' main line NG loco's, 4 different designs of 2-6-2 tanks.

Are you only looking at 2-6-2Ts, or are you saying that 2-6-2Ts were all there was? What about the 2-6-4Ts on the Leek and Manifold or the 0-6-0Ts on the Welshpool and Llanfair?

 

If you are looking at UK usage, in historical terms, then Irish 3' gauge main line locomotives far outnumber those found in mainland Britain. 2-6-4T was the most common wheel arrangement for "modern" locomotives, but pretty much every common combination trailing wheels was used with 6 driving wheels, and the Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway had two 4-8-4Ts and two 4-8-0s.

 

The Isle of Man Railway stuck with 2-4-0T for all its 20th century main line locomotives, but the Isle of Man is not UK in any sense.

 

In terms of UK design, I expect there is huge variety in locos made for export. Some overseas railways (in South Aftica, for example) designed their own locomotives and merely had UK companies build them, but other railways bought more-or-less off-the-shelf UK designs.

[johnofwessex]

3 minutes ago, Jeremy C said:

Are you only looking at 2-6-2Ts, or are you saying that 2-6-2Ts were all there was? What about the 2-6-4Ts on the Leek and Manifold or the 0-6-0Ts on the Welshpool and Llanfair?

 

If you are looking at UK usage, in historical terms, then Irish 3' gauge main line locomotives far outnumber those found in mainland Britain. 2-6-4T was the most common wheel arrangement for "modern" locomotives, but pretty much every common combination trailing wheels was used with 6 driving wheels, and the Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway had two 4-8-4Ts and two 4-8-0s.

 

The Isle of Man Railway stuck with 2-4-0T for all its 20th century main line locomotives, but the Isle of Man is not UK in any sense.

 

In terms of UK design, I expect there is huge variety in locos made for export. Some overseas railways (in South Aftica, for example) designed their own locomotives and merely had UK companies build them, but other railways bought more-or-less off-the-shelf UK designs.

 

Well, if you are looking at some sort of common themes you end up with a 2-6-2 out of a very small pool of 'main line' NG loco's that operated in the UK - there were also of course the two Campbletown & Macrihanish 0-6-2's 

 

I suggest that most Irish NG lines & the Isle of Man railways are very different animals to mainland UK lines

[DLT]

Examples of locos of locos similar to Russell, and all much the same mechanically speaking:

Leeds No.1  Supplied for reservoir construction in North Yorkshire, here  and  here

One of the many supplied to the Sierra Leone Railways SLR No.23