Midland Railway Company

[Hippel]

I'm ashamed to say that I live in Derby but knew nothing about this until after the event. Was it publicised much?

 

Paul.

[Compound2632]

20 minutes ago, Hippel said:

I'm ashamed to say that I live in Derby but knew nothing about this until after the event. Was it publicised much?

 

I couldn't say how well it was advertised locally but I gather the Museum was very pleased with the footfall - 773 visitors over six hours, or one through the doors every 30 seconds - a record for an event at the Museum since its opening last summer. I'm also told that the Study Centre has been inundated with enquiries.

[DenysW]

Possibly a question for the Imaginary Locomotives thread, but I thought I'd start here.

 

In 1915 Beyer Peacock supplied the Sao Paulo Railway three Q class Garratt locomotives (2-4-0+0-4-2) for their 5'3" gauge, and these ran successfully until dieselisation in 1950. The key facts were 160 psi boilers, 5'6" driving wheels, low axle loading (14 tons), and small water and coal supplies. They were intended for a very short section between Santos and Passaquera that had light track and weak bridges and shuttled back and forth at 30 mph with 1,000 ton trains. They look very similar to Black 5s in tractive effort, power output, grate size, heater exchanger area, etc, and were marginally shorter at 58'.

 

Would these have passed the Midland's Light Engine policy and given them an effective 5MT 10-20 years earlier? Maybe at 15 ton/axle with more coal and water? Higher weight and power with a higher pressure boiler are also a possibility - the Black 5s were at 225 psi, and at 20 tons/axle.

 

Technical details from https://www.steamlocomotive.com/locobase.php?country=Brazil&wheel=Beyer-Garratt&railroad=spr#566 and from A.E. Durrant "The Garratt Locomotive"  David & Charles, 1969.

 

[John-Miles]

What would and would not satisfy the requirements of the Midland's Engineering Department (i.e. Civil Engineers) is a matter of mystery and was to the CME and his staff.  The engineers seem to have been rather obstructive in their approach although when the Compounds turned out to be heavier than expected they did allow them to continue being used.

[technohand]

I thought they were more worried about Hammer blow when non dynamically balanced driving wheels cause excessive forces on structures but not sure. 

[DenysW]

This mostly looks like no-one in the Midland wanted to be responsible authorising more than the 18.5 tons/axle of the Midland Spinners, the 2F 0-6-0 tanks, or the 4F 0-6-0 tender engines, with the exception of 19.6 tons/axle for the express compounds, as noted by John-Miles above.

 

Could have been lack of data on design points/condition reports of the infrastructure, distrust of the CME's office bending the rules once they knew them, or just inertia. I've read a couple of, possibly apocryphal, stories of Stanier pushing back against Derby traditional wisdom, and finding it either wrong or over-simplistic.

 

It leaves me convinced that the Sao Paulo Garratt 2-4-0+0-2-4 design could have been used as an earlier, lighter 5MT design if the Midland had wanted one. This ignores the incremental cost of two sets of valve gear, and Bayer-Peacock's patent fees on the decision process. It might have made the later LMS Garratts less of a disappointment if there had been 10-15 years of in-house experience.

[bill-lobb]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Midland civil engineers imposed a restriction on weight per foot run as well as axle loading. To my frustration I can't remember where I read it - maybe Adrian Testers book on the 4Fs. Apparently this effectively precluded 0-8-0s, although I don't understand why. E.G. Barnes in his history also comments on underbridges on the London extension that required strengthening in  later days to allow larger locomotives - maybe that had something to do with it.

However I'm not convinced that the Midland operating department did want anything larger. I have commented elsewhere in RMWeb that the ASLEF magazine of 1907 included an article on locomotive development protesting against the current fashion for larger locomotives on the basis that they were wasteful and inefficient if they were spending much time working below their optimum capacity.  It is an interesting thought - we tend to think of double heading as being inefficient, but so too is a locomotive that is more powerful than it needs to be. Given that the Midland was a prosperous and profitable railway, it might be that they actually got their locomotive development right for their traffic conditions.

[jamie92208]

The same applied on the Settle and Carlisle which was built in the same era.  It wasn't the big stone built viaducts but the smaller cattle ccreeps and farm crossings.  These had to be rebuilt to cope with larger locos such as the Royal Scots.  Dave Hunt has a lot of the details.  I think  that a lot of it was due to the introduction of what might be called, scientific design, rather than rule of thumb by masons who learned their trade on canals. Dave gave a very interesting talk about this and the weight per foot was a factor.

 

Jamie

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Dave gave a very interesting talk about this and the weight per foot was a factor.

 

Did he ever write that up?

[jamie92208]

2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Did he ever write that up?

Not that I know of.  It was included in a talk about the so called, 'small engine' policy that he gave to an HMRS meeting some years ago. Looking at the engeering, economic and other factors that influenced policy. Eg the fact that most sheds were roundhouses with limited length turntables.

 

Jamie

Edited May 7, 2022 by jamie92208

[Regularity]

4 hours ago, bill-lobb said:

we tend to think of double heading as being inefficient, but so too is a locomotive that is more powerful than it needs to be

Hence the use of several diesel locos under a single control via multiple-unit capabilities.

In point of fact, GE in the USA produced a single unit capable of developing 6,000 bop, but most sales were for units of roughly ¾ the power: it is more flexible to couple up 3 units of lower power than 2 units of higher power.

In pre-WW1 days, the additional costs of two crews were seen as a small price to pay for this flexibility.

However, if there was a regular traffic flow sufficient to justify a larger loco, then it would be wasteful to have two locos to maintain/support/crew rather than a larger single unit - a single SDJR 7F would make sense in place of two 3F 0-6-0s, for example.

[Compound2632]

4 minutes ago, Regularity said:

a single SDJR 7F would make sense in place of two 3F 0-6-0s, for example.

 

Except that on test, it didn't, being designed for a relatively short period of high effort up 1:50 banks rather than continuous steady output over a route with 1:200 gradients.

 

Iron horses for iron courses.

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Except that on test, it didn't, being designed for a relatively short period of high effort up 1:50 banks rather than continuous steady output over a route with 1:200 gradients.

 

Iron horses for iron courses.

Well, ok: but something of that size, designed for different requirements (I.e. a different firebox/boiler arrangement, such as the Stanier 2-8-0) would have suited.

It was an illustration of the concept: testing a loco designed for the SDJR on the Midland mainline was bound to prove ineffective - as the CME would (or should) have been well aware. Simplest way to block development: set up an unfair test.

[Regularity]

5 hours ago, bill-lobb said:

Given that the Midland was a prosperous and profitable railway, it might be that they actually got their locomotive development right for their traffic conditions.

BTW, I totally agree with that: railways were businesses.

But that way of operating did not necessarily suit other railways, such as the LNWR, because it was run differently from the start.

[lanchester]

The thing I don't quite get, though, is that it was really the Midland that started the trend towards heavier (passenger) trains, with their introduction of sleepers, diners, Pullmans - heavier vehicles and more of them - so you would expect them to have been going towards larger locomotives, and indeed as has been noted above the Compounds were large for their time: but then it all stopped. Other, reasonably comparable, lines didn't - the GER didn't stop at 'Clauds' (and they certainly had infrastructure constraints such as turntable lengths) and built 4-6-0s, the Great Central went beyond 'Directors', and the NER beyond the M and R class, to Atlantics (successfully) and 4-6-0s (less successfully). Even most of the Scottish railways tried to bulk up, and while the Highland's attempts were kyboshed by their CCE, at least they tried. Some at least of those must have had passenger businesses with similarities to the Midland?

 

Freight/minerals business models of course are entirely different things, even on the same railway. One takes the point about coal trains (limits on lay-by lengths, too many dodgy PO wagons, not time sensitive, etc) but I would have thought the Midland would have had an interest in faster, if not necessarily heavier, trains for traffics such as Fish, Beer, parcels, newspapers - these were highly competed for on time as well as rates, not to mention the operational advantages of getting these a bit closer to passenger timings. I would have thought the Midland's Commercial people, not to mention the customer-shareholders in places like Burton, would have been kicking up? But where is the equivalent of the GNR's K1/K2; the S1/2/3 on the NER, the GCR's Imminghams, Urie's S15s etc?

 

Saying that a 'smaller engine' policy suited their business model only raises questions about why they had a business model seemingly unlike any of their competitors.

[Tom Burnham]

I'm not an expert but I was under the impression that the Midland - at least in its later decades - favoured a more frequent service of shorter passenger trains, in comparison to the LNWR for example. No doubt there were exceptions, such as Scotch expresses with sleeping cars and such, but that would be where double heading was resorted to.

That doesn't explain the lack of motive power for fast goods trains of course.

[Compound2632]

18 minutes ago, lanchester said:

The thing I don't quite get, though, is that it was really the Midland that started the trend towards heavier (passenger) trains, with their introduction of sleepers, diners, Pullmans - heavier vehicles and more of them - so you would expect them to have been going towards larger locomotives, and indeed as has been noted above the Compounds were large for their time: but then it all stopped. 

 

The Pullman cars were heavy vehicles for their time - the 1870s and 80s - but they were only ever on the Scotch expresses and the principal London - Manchester / Liverpool expresses. Even so, there's plenty of evidence from Ahrons amongst other sources that even with the heaviest Scotch expresses of the first decade of the S&C route - including a pair of Pullmans and two or three of the pioneering 54 ft bogie 12-wheelers, along with several bogie 8-wheelers, 6-wheelers, and 4-wheel brakes - Johnson's 2-4-0s and Kirtley's 800 Class 2-4-0s (as reboilered by Johnson) were on top of the job. Those were large engines for their day.

 

Throughout the 1880s and 90s, the passenger 2-4-0s, 4-4-0s, and 4-2-2s continued to be big engines, if you put them alongside their contemporaries.

 

In terms of dining and sleeping carriages, the Midland was always a step behind the LNWR and its principal trains were never as long and heavy as those of that line, which was, after all, the dominant company in the passenger business, just as the Midland was the dominant company in goods and mineral business. In the 20th century, on the passenger side, the Midland's "little and often" model did not require expensive large locomotives - so can be seen as good business sense.

 

33 minutes ago, lanchester said:

I would have thought the Midland would have had an interest in faster, if not necessarily heavier, trains for traffics such as Fish, Beer, parcels, newspapers - these were highly competed for on time as well as rates, not to mention the operational advantages of getting these a bit closer to passenger timings.

 

I'm not so sure about the urgency of beer but otherwise the Midland did cater for these traffics - fish, parcels, and newspapers were all conveyed by passenger train. The Midland, from the early years of the 20th century, had built up a service of fitted express goods trains for other time-sensitive freight; these trains ran at night, hauled by the express passenger engines - doing double duty. No need for specialist types?

 

37 minutes ago, lanchester said:

But where is the equivalent of the GNR's K1/K2; the S1/2/3 on the NER, the GCR's Imminghams, Urie's S15s etc?

 

Saying that a 'smaller engine' policy suited their business model only raises questions about why they had a business model seemingly unlike any of their competitors.

 

The North Eastern was rich on its short-haul mineral traffic. But what dividend were the Great Northern and the Great Central paying in the early 20th century?

[Compound2632]

2 minutes ago, Tom Burnham said:

That doesn't explain the lack of motive power for fast goods trains of course.

 

No lack - what do express passenger engines do o'nights?

[lezz01]

How big was the Midland passenger business? As far as I know when the Midland took over the LTSR it doubled the Midlands passenger receipts. So to my mind they were much more freight centric than passenger.

Regards Lez.  

[Regularity]

59 minutes ago, Tom Burnham said:

That doesn't explain the lack of motive power for fast goods trains of course.

58 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Those were large engines for their day.

 

57 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

No lack - what do express passenger engines do o'nights?

We forget that we view things from a long lens.

 

Most importantly, wheel arrangement is not the be-all and end-all of lomotive design. As the SDJR 2-8-0s showed, the boiler and firebox need to be balanced to provide steam in a manner which suits the work, steady pulling versus hard work in bursts followed by coasting downhill.

Secondly, in the early- to mid- Edwardian era, the Midland’s top locos were in the same league as most of their peers. Even by 1914, most railways were using predominantly 4-4-0s and 0-6-0s, and many had 4-6-0s which frankly weren’t what they were intended to be.

Finally, the various MR 0-6-0s, particularly of the 3F power class, were good steamers and free runners even at 60mph, and this would be very fast for the day.

 

It is only with hindsight, and a perhaps blinkered view by some to make the LMS the “greater Midland” (and even here, I am not so sure this was as much the case as people think; just two key people in influential positions, who are strong minded enough to do the job, but lacking in the humility to listen to other viewpoints, is all it needs to stifle development*) that we come to see the MR as being somehow beleaguered by a small engine policy. 
 

It wasn’t. It worked, it made money for its shareholders, but it did not leave it in the best place the the 20s and 30s: it required Josiah Stamp to sort that out. One could argue that a slightly smaller dividend, with more capital investment in strengthening the infrastructure, would have been better in the long-term, but since when have most capitalists been interested in anything beyond a few years? (Typically, 5 at the outside.)
 

* Or waste time trying to prove how effective nationalisation might have been, had it come 25 years earlier, with a range of about a dozen classes. That idea came from a Crewe man, who had been sidelined by the LMS** to engage a more forward-looking CME in the form of Ivatt.

** They him a double-promotion to a vice-presidential role, to stop him from designing 12 new classes of steam engine. ***
*** The new nationalised railway simply offered the role to the most “senior” person with a mechanical engineering background. A privately run single, national company would have put it out to open competition.

[Compound2632]

1 hour ago, lezz01 said:

How big was the Midland passenger business? As far as I know when the Midland took over the LTSR it doubled the Midlands passenger receipts. So to my mind they were much more freight centric than passenger.

 

The only Railway Year Book of which I have a complete pdf is that of 1922, giving statistics for the year ended 31 Dec 1921, the last year before the LNW / L&Y amalgamation. It's not an ideal comparison, as things were still distorted by the War; one would want to look at, say, 1899, to get a picture of the heyday of the pre-grouping companies. There is very little difference between the "big three" - LNW, Mid, and GW. All were capitalised to a bit over £100 million and net receipts a bit over £6 million - about 6% of capital. 

 

Passenger business is a bit difficult to disentangle since the Year Book only gives number of journeys, not passenger miles or passenger receipts; for that one wants the Railway returns made to the BoT (MoT) - I only have the Midland pages of those. In millions:

 

                         LNW         Mid          GW

1st class          1.16          0.91         1.08

3rd class       53.34        52.57       71.34

workmen      28.96        28.39       18.54

 

As you say, many of the Midland journeys will have been short-distance on the LTS whereas the LNW undoubtedly had a considerably higher proportion of the long-distance journeys - but what was the relative proportion of long to short distance journeys even on the LNW?

 

In fact, the greatest number of passenger journeys were made on the Metropolitan District Railway - about twice as many as on any of the "big three" - while the greatest number of first class journeys was 1.9 million on the...

 

 

 

... wait for it ...

 

 

 

... Lancashire & Yorkshire.

 

(So much for northern frugality!)

Edited May 8, 2022 by Compound2632

[bill-lobb]

3 hours ago, lanchester said:

The thing I don't quite get, though, is that it was really the Midland that started the trend towards heavier (passenger) trains, with their introduction of sleepers, diners, Pullmans - heavier vehicles and more of them - so you would expect them to have been going towards larger locomotives, and indeed as has been noted above the Compounds were large for their time: but then it all stopped. Other, reasonably comparable, lines didn't - the GER didn't stop at 'Clauds' (and they certainly had infrastructure constraints such as turntable lengths) and built 4-6-0s, the Great Central went beyond 'Directors', and the NER beyond the M and R class, to Atlantics (successfully) and 4-6-0s (less successfully). Even most of the Scottish railways tried to bulk up, and while the Highland's attempts were kyboshed by their CCE, at least they tried. Some at least of those must have had passenger businesses with similarities to the Midland?

 

Freight/minerals business models of course are entirely different things, even on the same railway. One takes the point about coal trains (limits on lay-by lengths, too many dodgy PO wagons, not time sensitive, etc) but I would have thought the Midland would have had an interest in faster, if not necessarily heavier, trains for traffics such as Fish, Beer, parcels, newspapers - these were highly competed for on time as well as rates, not to mention the operational advantages of getting these a bit closer to passenger timings. I would have thought the Midland's Commercial people, not to mention the customer-shareholders in places like Burton, would have been kicking up? But where is the equivalent of the GNR's K1/K2; the S1/2/3 on the NER, the GCR's Imminghams, Urie's S15s etc?

 

Saying that a 'smaller engine' policy suited their business model only raises questions about why they had a business model seemingly unlike any of their competitors.

 

I am not so much thinking of a business model as the requirements of their traffic. I understand that the NER and GCR used 4-6-0s  for fish traffic. However they served huge fishing ports in Hull and Grimsby. I can't think of anywhere the Midland served anything like that size.

I understand that the driver for heavier train weights and therefore larger engines in the late 19th & earlier 20th century was the increasing use of corridor carriages. A  swift perusal of  the Jenkinson & Essery and Lacy & Dow books on Midland carriages show that the Midland was not a huge user of corridor carriages.

As Compound2632 has said express freights could be worked by passenger loco. There was an article in (I think) Midland Record describing an express freight service from London which was always diagrammed to a Compound.

 

 

1 hour ago, lezz01 said:

How big was the Midland passenger business? As far as I know when the Midland took over the LTSR it doubled the Midlands passenger receipts. So to my mind they were much more freight centric than passenger.

Regards Lez.  

 

According to Adrian Tester's  book " A Defence of the Midland/LMS Class 4 0-6-0s" the percentage of revenue from goods traffic was:

LNWR 59.2%

GWR 55.8%

Midland 68.7%

North Eastern 67.4%

L&YR 59.2%

Great Central 69.5%

According to the footnote these were taken from O S Nocks book on British Steam locomotives but I can't see what period they cover. Interesting that both the Midland and GCR are marginally higher than the NER, which I had always tended to think of the mineral mover par excellence.

 

Bill

Edited May 8, 2022 by bill-lobb
correct spelling

[Nick Lawson]

Quote

In fact, the greatest number of passenger journeys were made on the Metropolitan District Railway

OS Nock ("LNER Steam") quotes the GER's American General Manager Henry Thornton in 1922, thus:

"I would humbly direct attention to the fact that the Great Eastern Railway, at its Liverpool Street Station, (London) handles annually 76,136,823 passengers."

Thornton was seeing-off "biggest" claims in the NYT on behalf of his old company the Long Island Railway who handled a mere 32M passengers at Flatbush, Brooklyn.

 

I have no idea how this measures up against the Metropolitan District? Thornton didn't actually say the GER was the biggest! Nock also describes the handling of the bulk of this volume by rakes of 16 4-wheelers hauled by J69 tanks, departing at 2 minute intervals. Acceleration rather that top speed being a key factor.

[Compound2632]

32 minutes ago, Nick Lawson said:

I have no idea how this measures up against the Metropolitan District? 

 

Go on then, since you ask. Numbers of passenger journeys in millions, numbers of seasons in thousands, for the year ending 31 Dec 1921:

 

                                 GE           L&Y        Met        MD

1st class                 1.44         1.90        1.70         -

2nd class                1.47           -              -             -

3rd class               59.51      47.60       61.14    80.12

workmen              25.21      22.28       12.33    22.52

annual seasons   79.3         65.7         33.1      27.67

 

For the Metropolitan District, the total at 3rd class includes 1st class (not quoted separately) and for seasons, the number given is the estimated number of journeys, in millions, rather than tickets issued. The Met carried 769 second class passengers - did it abolish second early in January 1921? 

 

The four railways in the Underground Group carried around 350 million passengers in the year.

[Nick Holliday]

18 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

The only Railway Year Book of which I have a complete pdf is that of 1922, giving statistics for the year ended 31 Dec 1921, the last year before the LNW / L&Y amalgamation. It's not an ideal comparison, as things were still distorted by the War; one would want to look at, say, 1899, to get a picture of the heyday of the pre-grouping companies. There is very little difference between the "big three" - LNW, Mid, and GW. All were capitalised to a bit over £100 million and net receipts a bit over £6 million - about 6% of capital. 

 

Passenger business is a bit difficult to disentangle since the Year Book only gives number of journeys, not passenger miles or passenger receipts; for that one wants the Railway returns made to the BoT (MoT) - I only have the Midland pages of those. In millions:

 

                         LNW         Mid          GW

1st class          1.16          0.91         1.08

3rd class       53.34        52.57       71.34

workmen      28.96        28.39       18.54

 

As you say, many of the Midland journeys will have been short-distance on the LTS whereas the LNW undoubtedly had a considerably higher proportion of the long-distance journeys - but what was the relative proportion of long to short distance journeys even on the LNW?

 

In fact, the greatest number of passenger journeys were made on the Metropolitan District Railway - about twice as many as on any of the "big three" - while the greatest number of first class journeys was 1.9 million on the...

... wait for it ...

... Lancashire & Yorkshire.

(So much for northern frugality!)

David Jenkinson's British Railway Carriages of the 20th Century Volume 1 includes a variety of interesting tables comparing various elements of passenger traffic, with figures for 1901, 1911 and 1921.  Unfortunately it doesn't break out the workmen's figures from the total of 3rd class traveller, and the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District are ignored.

In terms of total passenger bookings, in 1901 it was the GER at No. 1, with 120 million, with the LNWR and GWR at around 80 million, and SECR 4th.  In 1911 it was the GWR on top, with 102 million, GER second and LNWR third, and LSWR 4th. It was only in 1921 that the MR crept into the top three, just pipping the GER who had slipped to fourth with only(!) 78 million.

There are some interesting tables showing revenues from different parameters, where the commuting lines around London feature, such as the LBSCR achieving the highest revenue per route mile.

And as for the L&YR and first class traffic, it was the Caledonian that trumped all the other lines in all years, 3.1m in 1901, 2.5m in 1991 and 2.5m in 1921, against the L&YR 0.9m, 1.1m and 1.9m in 1921. The Midland's figures for those years are 1.4m, 1.6m and 1.3m. Perhaps this is all a reflection on the quality of the third class accommodation!