Bristol Siddeley Maybach engines for the WR Westerns, qc & liability from not building per design?

[OnTheBranchline]

I recently watched this video "The Tale of Diesel Hydraulics" by YouTube Historian Ruairidh MacVeigh

 

In the video, he talks about the Maybach engines built by Bristol Siddeley for the Westerns having many problems "and in some instances, it was discovered that some of the materials used in building the engines were not up to the design specification" including the compressor's lower central shaft roller bearing was found to be subsititued for a cheaper alternative.

 

Is this true?

 

If so, isn't that a significant breach of contract & liability for Bristol Siddeley because they did not follow what was asked of them?

 

And to extrapolate this, what was BR's response to manufacturers who mucked around like this?

 

I guess I might be looking with 2023 eyes vs what was acceptable in the 1950s/1960s.

Edited May 29, 2023 by OnTheBranchline

[BR traction instructor]

I find this title to be the most in depth account of diesel hydraulic locos on BR. Well worth reading...

 

BeRTIe

[keefer]

I'm more surprised that BR (or BTC) continued to give business to Paxman given the problems with their own engines. Under-powered compared to the competition and with questionable reliability up until the Ventura in the cl.29s (not perfect but certainly better). How they managed to come up with the mighty Valenta is a wonder!

[Wickham Green too]

Rail traction was only a small part of all diesel engine manufacturers' business and unless we know how they fared in other sectors it'll be difficult to make sense of the situation in our area of interest. ☹️

[Phil Bullock]

Cylinder heads were a big weakness in the British built Maybachs. They ended up being replaced … apparently there was a wall built of faulty ones at Swindon!

 

If you want to hear more about fun with Maybachs then the groups with Maybach fitted locos are worth following on the web or facebook…

 

Western Locomotive Association… MD655s in D1013/62

Diesel Traction Group …. MD655/538s in D1015, MD650s in D821, MD870 in D7029

Diesel and Electric Group … MD655s in D1010, MD870s in D7017/8

Bury Hydraulic Group … MD655s in D1041, MD650s in D832, MD870 in D7076

 

The fact that they are all still running over 45 years since BR stopped using the type probably says a lot about design and build quality… once Swindon had sorted them! 

[D7666]

Considering that BR for any engine make you care to name be it Maybach or MAN or EE or Sulzer or Paxman or anyone else almost never used the correct spec lubricant or winter coolant or followed the correct engine hours maintenance intervals I doubt they would ever have had a leg to stand on on a warranty claim. They probably annulled it the day the thing entered traffic.

[OnTheBranchline]

On 31/05/2023 at 18:58, D7666 said:

Considering that BR for any engine make you care to name be it Maybach or MAN or EE or Sulzer or Paxman or anyone else almost never used the correct spec lubricant or winter coolant or followed the correct engine hours maintenance intervals I doubt they would ever have had a leg to stand on on a warranty claim. They probably annulled it the day the thing entered traffic.

 

So why did BR let them get away with it?

[D7666]

1 hour ago, OnTheBranchline said:

 

So why did BR let them get away with it?

Let who get away with what ?

 

If you are asking that about what I posted, it was BR using the wrong lubricants, BR using the wrong coolants, BR not following engine hours. BR. Not the maker.

[kevinlms]

Doesn't the manufacturer have to provide a warranty and if items fail under the terms of the sale/tender, isn't the onus on them to rectify? So if some cheaper part is substituted and wrecks an engine, then the manufacturer should have to cough up.

[spamcan61]

9 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

Doesn't the manufacturer have to provide a warranty and if items fail under the terms of the sale/tender, isn't the onus on them to rectify? So if some cheaper part is substituted and wrecks an engine, then the manufacturer should have to cough up.

Presumably, but D7666 is referring to customer misuse. I do recall reading in Traction magazine a few months back that BR didn't use anti-freeze in diesels, at least in the early years. Hence another reason to leave the poor things idling for hours on end, which isn't good for any IC engine to the best of my knowledge.

[jjb1970]

The engine manufacturer warranty is conditional on use of the specified lubricant and coolant and maintaining the engine in accordance with the service manual. Go outside those and the engine builder will quite rightly wash their hands and say that if the user is ignoring those requirements then they are not responsible for any warranty claims.

[jjb1970]

On 30/05/2023 at 04:24, Wickham Green too said:

Rail traction was only a small part of all diesel engine manufacturers' business and unless we know how they fared in other sectors it'll be difficult to make sense of the situation in our area of interest. ☹️

 

That varies by engine builder, and size. Small industrial engines are used in all sorts of applications and mass produced on a similar scale almost like automotive engines. 

 

If you look at mid-large engines (several hundreds of KW and up) then rail is a significant market and for some manufacturers (GE, EMD, their core market). Other manufacturers are largely absent from rail traction.

 

In marine use it's unusual to get a complete disaster in terms of reliability, the main differentiator is fuel consumption and maintenance cost. There are debacles (the Ruston AO comes to mind) but as a rule most of them work.

 

And the biggest engines are reserved for marine and stationary use because of size.

[OnTheBranchline]

1 hour ago, D7666 said:

Let who get away with what ?

 

If you are asking that about what I posted, it was BR using the wrong lubricants, BR using the wrong coolants, BR not following engine hours. BR. Not the maker.

 

I apologize, I misread. 

[D7666]

44 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

The engine manufacturer warranty is conditional on use of the specified lubricant and coolant and maintaining the engine in accordance with the service manual. Go outside those and the engine builder will quite rightly wash their hands and say that if the user is ignoring those requirements then they are not responsible for any warranty claims.

Absolutely my point.

 

It would not matter if item X is defective by supplier and different item Y is abused by the customer, the customer has not a leg to stand on with warranty claims.

 

I can't go into detail but ITYF with mega-£££ contracts there is not liability in the same way that your home TV or washing machine has. I know for sure from my job many maker defects are not liable, indeed, there are usually contract clauses that allow suppliers to deliver products with defects and without warranty. I know, because, as a customer, I am heavily involved with this right now. And it gets very complex when your supplier has deilvered you COTS parts where the OEM kit is defective, and so on.

 

If you take your Maybach engines that Bristol Siddley made. Rings and pistons (and I think valves) were made by Wellworthys. I know that. My dad was a Wellworthys machine setter / QA inspector making some of those parts for both BS and BR. So say a ring supplied to BS is defective, but unknown to BS, they build an engine, supply it to BR, who thrash the thing to death on the wrong lubricant and many engine hours later the ring fails. Who caused what ? You will waste more paying M'learned Counsel in court to sort that out than ever you will by simply getting on with it.

Edited June 2, 2023 by D7666

[kevinlms]

11 hours ago, D7666 said:

Absolutely my point.

 

It would not matter if item X is defective by supplier and different item Y is abused by the customer, the customer has not a leg to stand on with warranty claims.

 

I can't go into detail but ITYF with mega-£££ contracts there is not liability in the same way that your home TV or washing machine has. I know for sure from my job many maker defects are not liable, indeed, there are usually contract clauses that allow suppliers to deliver products with defects and without warranty. I know, because, as a customer, I am heavily involved with this right now. And it gets very complex when your supplier has deilvered you COTS parts where the OEM kit is defective, and so on.

 

If you take your Maybach engines that Bristol Siddley made. Rings and pistons (and I think valves) were made by Wellworthys. I know that. My dad was a Wellworthys machine setter / QA inspector making some of those parts for both BS and BR. So say a ring supplied to BS is defective, but unknown to BS, they build an engine, supply it to BR, who thrash the thing to death on the wrong lubricant and many engine hours later the ring fails. Who caused what ? You will waste more paying M'learned Counsel in court to sort that out than ever you will by simply getting on with it.

But with that attitude, think about all the poor people in the legal profession, including their support staff.

[uax6]

There's a good explanation of BR's woes with diesel engines (the larger ones) in 'The diesel Impact on British Railways' by RM Tufnell. It is a good read, and really shows that BR was using diesel locomotives completely differently to a lot of other organisations, and was therefore finding faults that hadn't manifested in other administrations usage.

 

As for warranty claims, BR did successfully get things changed under warranty. For example, Paxmans wanted to supply the engines in the class 17 with Iron heads, but BR insisted on having Ally heads, as supplied on the two car demu test train, so Paxman, wanting the business, agreed, only to find that as the locos were working harder than the demu, that thermal cracking occurred. BR then put a warranty claim in and Paxmans supplied iron heads as part of this, although not as a freebee, there was some money changing hands too. 

Reading around various books written by shedmasters during the transition period, and the makers staff that were allocate to various sheds, were kept very busy doing modifications to the supplied equipment to keep it in service, most of which BR didn't pay for.

 

Andy G 

[MarkC]

Mmm, apropos of everything and nothing, I have seen serious failures in my own industry where parts, on the face of it identical to those supplied as OEM (and made by a reputable company, not pattern parts - AKA "supplied by Ali Baba") have caused catastrophic incidents, the worst being a ball bearing on the vertical shaft of a large fuel centrifuge collapsing, leading to the shaft shearing whilst at full speed, some 8000rpm, and the bowl, about 450mm in diameter & weighing about 80kg, going walkabout after smashing its way through the machine casing...

 

I've also been involved in a warranty claim against a well known British engine manufacturer - we ended up in the High Court - where the cylinder heads were cracking after only a couple of hundred operating hours. Turned out - after I as the Chief Engineer, and several others, had had to both give evidence and be cross-examined by the other side's barristers, who were trying to blame us - that the engines should never have been sold on the promise that they could deliver continuous power output as claimed, using an existing design of cylinder head. Amazing what evidence can turn up during disclosure...

 

Using wrong spec lub oils - yep, seen that too...

 

Mark

[kevinlms]

On 30/05/2023 at 03:16, OnTheBranchline said:

I recently watched this video "The Tale of Diesel Hydraulics" by YouTube Historian Ruairidh MacVeigh

 

In the video, he talks about the Maybach engines built by Bristol Siddeley for the Westerns having many problems "and in some instances, it was discovered that some of the materials used in building the engines were not up to the design specification" including the compressor's lower central shaft roller bearing was found to be subsititued for a cheaper alternative.

 

Is this true?

 

If so, isn't that a significant breach of contract & liability for Bristol Siddeley because they did not follow what was asked of them?

 

And to extrapolate this, what was BR's response to manufacturers who mucked around like this?

 

I guess I might be looking with 2023 eyes vs what was acceptable in the 1950s/1960s.

But what if the manufacturer found that the original part proved to be of inferior quality to a later cheaper part - it does happen. Would you expect the manufacturer to continue making the engine exactly 'as per contract'?

 

It could also mean that a company won't innovate if they risk being sued for changing the design.

 

The English Electric engines went through many design changes over their long lives. How would they have faired, if the engines used in the 'LMS Twins' continued to be supplied and were installed in the Class 50s, 20 years later?

[Phil Bullock]

9 minutes ago, MarkC said:

Mmm, apropos of everything and nothing, I have seen serious failures in my own industry where parts, on the face of it identical to those supplied as OEM (and made by a reputable company, not pattern parts - AKA "supplied by Ali Baba") have caused catastrophic incidents, the worst being a ball bearing on the vertical shaft of a large fuel centrifuge collapsing, leading to the shaft shearing whilst at full speed, some 8000rpm, and the bowl, about 450mm in diameter & weighing about 80kg, going walkabout after smashing its way through the machine casing...

 

Mark

Tricky things centrifuges…. Let alone the risks associated with Newtonian forces there’s also the aerosol risk when centrifuging biological material….

[jjb1970]

48 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

But what if the manufacturer found that the original part proved to be of inferior quality to a later cheaper part - it does happen. Would you expect the manufacturer to continue making the engine exactly 'as per contract'?

 

It could also mean that a company won't innovate if they risk being sued for changing the design.

 

The English Electric engines went through many design changes over their long lives. How would they have faired, if the engines used in the 'LMS Twins' continued to be supplied and were installed in the Class 50s, 20 years later?

 

That's not a problem. The manufacturer updates the design, issues a service bulletin informing operators of the change and manuals and spare parts lists are updated. Normal contracts allow for such changes. What invalidates a warranty or manufacturer liability is the operator taking it upon themselves to use non-original parts or to change the design.

[jjb1970]

Control of engine licensees has always been a problem for the licensors, and continues to be one. The licensor controls the drawings and retains ownership of the design, but it's common for licensees to amend things to better fit with their own manufacturing processes and materials. 

[slilley]

Having written several books on locos with Sulzer engines, those locomotives were plauged with issues. Some of these were manufacturing ones, others were caused shall we say "operator error".  My Class 47 book went into some detail about the problems with their engines and my forthcoming "Peak" book will do likewise about the multitude of problems with their engines.

 

There was a regular Sulzer Service problems meeting held between various BR officials and Sulzer. I have only come across one set of minutes from November 1961. For example some cylinder blocks not only in the 12-cylinder Sulzer engines, but also in the 8-cylinder, and 6-cylinder ones had developed fractures. On investigation, the cause was found to be defective welding. Some problems appeared to be of the railways’ own making. Two fuel injector nozzles were produced by Sulzer, which had come from Nos D69 and D72. It was thought they were actually from English Electric engines as they had a 0.35mm hole diameter, rather than the Sulzer 0.45mm diameter. Sulzer emphasised the dangers of high line pressure caused by incorrect fittings.

 

I could go on about the problems with the Peak engines but that would spoil my forthcoming book. Needless to say the rectification work was very expensive and Sulzer stumped up some £1,179,000 towards the cost, equivilent to some £16.8m at todays prices.

 

As for other manufacturers, I know that various problems with the MAN engines NBL supplied for various locomotives were the subject of warranty claims and such was the potential claim, NBL made it clear to BR at one point that if they proceeded with the claim NBL would go out of business, which of course they did.

 

The BTC also made late delivery claims against several manufacturers, Crompton Parkinson were the subject of at least two claims for the late delivery of equipment for the Peaks and the Class 33s and GEC had problems with the electrical equipment for the Class 27s.

 

All this kind of thing is detailed in the minutes of various BTC committees that managed the whole locomotive procurement process. 

 

Simon

[KeithMacdonald]

On 03/06/2023 at 04:53, kevinlms said:

think about all the poor people in the legal profession, including their support staff.

 

I'm thinking about ... hmm .... no, sorry, it's not working, I can't think of any poor legal professional people.  Maybe the support staff get paid a pittance though? But would they be able to find a lawyer to take their case?

 

[phil_sutters]

Maybach in the air, Maybach on the rails, Maybach on the road - my great uncle's Mercedes Maybach 19 litre air-ship engine tourer, with my mother posed by it at Percy's funeral.

 

[KeithMacdonald]

On 03/06/2023 at 14:45, jjb1970 said:

Control of engine licensees has always been a problem for the licensors, and continues to be one. The licensor controls the drawings and retains ownership of the design, but it's common for licensees to amend things to better fit with their own manufacturing processes and materials. 

 

I remember this exact same (and painful) problem from my time at GEC Traction. There was a running battle between the Design Engineers and the Production Engineers.

 

Design Engineers would release design version 1.0 of Widget XYZ. Then Production Engineering would talk to Sales, to get a guestimate of how many to produce, then schedule a production run of quantity X1.

 

But then Design Engineers would say "Oh, we just need to make a change to (whatever)" and release design version 1.1. If Production Engineering was very lucky, version 1.1 was compatible with version 1.0. But of course, usually it wasn't, so quantity X1 of version 1.0 goes onto the scrap pile. But not all of it, because some of version 1.0  might already have been assembled or delivered to customers, so some of version 1.0 goes into the Spares Stockpile. Along with some of version 1.1.

 

Rinse and repeat with version 1.2, version 1.3, version 1.4....

 

Then Sales would come back and say they'd been really clever and sold more of version 1.0, and some of version 1.1, and some of version 1.2. And they had promised the customers they would all get delivered at the same time. From production lines that could only cope with one version at a time. Plus the exponentially growing risk of cockups when wrong versions of Widget XYZ and Floggle Grummit Mk3 fitted together.

 

Eventually the Spares Stockpile grew so huge it ran out of warehouse space. So more £ millions of spares went to scrap instead.