whart57

Yet I was sent a scan of a drawing from the 1850s of Sharp Stewart 's standard mixed traffic engine - an 0-4-2 as it happens. Also why would companies go to the expense of automatic brakes on goods engines in the 1880s if not for the eventuality of needing them for passenger trains.

Perhaps I should have said 2-4-0s or 0-4-2s ......... On the pre-1900 LNWR, MR or GWR wouldn't you have seen 2-4-0s on secondary passenger trains?

I have to say that the post-war Thompson and the "wrong" part of Yorkshire would have passed over my head. It's the single track line pretending to be an express route that never looks right. I like to see the producers make an effort. I mentioned the use of the Hoorn-Medemblik line in the Netherlands to stand in for pre WW1 Northern Germany in the Riddle of the Sands earlier in this thread. It's wrong, I know it's wrong, but it's in context. It could be a branchline on Germany's Ost-Frisland coast if you weren't someone who knew different. It's the, we need a steam engine, any steam engine will do attitude that grates.

Always a problem when a mainline train needs to be represented

Plenty of Moguls were built, just not many with inside cylinders.

My personal opinion is that 1900 is a poor cutoff point. OK, it's the start of a new century but in railway development terms it doesn't really represent a watershed. Maybe if you are interested in the SECR it is because of that company's specific history, or again the Great Central because that is when it became a national rather than a regional railway. However to answer the question I would suggest one giveaway is the absence of six wheel coaches in mainline trains, and four wheel carriages generally. Low roofs too, despite Victorian men wearing top hats carriage ceilings didn't accommodate them. So if the passenger trains are all bogie carriages, even if they have clerestories and outside panelling, then I'd suspect it wasn't pre-1900. Another sniff for me would be if all the six wheel locos were 0-6-0. Pre-1900 I would expect there to be 2-4-0s and 0-4-2s on passenger and mixed traffic duties.

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Some light railways would only have the one powered vehicle though.

Why am I posting this stuff in here? Well because one of the more speculative ideas I have for model railways is what would a light railway in the hands of a true moderniser have looked like. If instead of running services with a patched up Terrier a light railway had gambled on using IC powered railcars, particularly ones with enough oomph - and braking power - to attach a coal wagon or a van.

They did both. Some IC railcars were intended for branch line use, like these four wheel jobbies intended for use in Zeeland Although this pic is taken on the preserved SGB line, unusually for preserved stock, this railcar is on its original stamping ground. Another use to which railcars were put to work on were the odd stubs around the network. The one I posted earlier with the massive bus radiator was intended for use on the line from Zwolle to Kampen, a branch poorly laid out for operating as part of a wider network. Gouda to Alphen was another line that lay across the main traffic flows and that was another early recipient of railcars. It mustn't be overlooked that the Netherlands Railways were looking to banish steam, at least from the passenger service, by the early 1940s. They would probably have achieved it had WW2 not intervened.

Those first Dutch streamliners were in fact intended for another purpose namely to run stopping trains in between the faster mainline trains. In common with many others the first reaction the Dutch railways had to motor bus competition was to put loads of halts on their existing lines. Then they discovered this just slowed the trains down, all that extra stopping and starting. So the idea was to serve the halts with a diesel car and keep the mainline trains just stopping at the major stations. They ended up shutting the halts where local growth didn't result in an upgrade anyway.

The rail unions were also opposed to crew savings, and argued successfully for the retention of the "fireman" well into the diesel era. In Europe when the need to tend a fire under a big kettle went away the man doing that was also taken away, and it could be argued that this made marginal branch lines more economic to run using internal combustion motors. Britain had the "flying bananas" on the GWR, but otherwise the branch line train was a steam-hauled job requiring three men to run it. The Netherlands on the other hand was bringing in petrol and diesel powered railcars from 1923 on. There's something brutish about these units with the massive radiator up front. In the spirit of this thread you have to wonder what it would have looked like had the LMS or LNER tried a similar experiment. The styling department of the NS did get to work and came up with this unit just before WW2 A composite 2nd and 3rd class (the Netherlands abolished first class rather than second when going to a two class system). The small folding doors between the compartments give access to the engine room. Sadly for this series of eight units WW2 intervened. Fuel rationing limited their deployment after the German invasion in 1940 and in 1945 only one was still in working order. Two heavily damaged units were restored to service in 1950, but the rest were simply missing. Two eventually turned up on the other side of the Iron Curtain. After the war diesel electric units completed the replacement of steam traction on the branch lines The later Dutch railbuses were fitted with the Scharfenberg coupling, interestingly the Germans retained traditional buffers and couplings on their schienenbussen I believe that was so they could take the odd van or coal truck with them, thus saving on a freight working. This was an important consideration because if we take the example of the Colonel Stephens railways, the savings made using petrol railcars were not fully realised if the railway still needed to stoke up a steam engine for the goods train. But if the railcar was made powerful and robust enough to tow 2-3 goods trucks then it was unlikely to be much cheaper to run than a steam engine.

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Surely that had more to do with the convenience of oil in the specific circumstances of warships. Coaling a battleship was very labour intensive and coal bulky to shift. Bit of an issue at Scapa Flow never mind the far flung bases around the world

All that is true, but I think the point is that moving away from free trade and competition towards a closed imperial market was to encourage conservatism. That's often the case with protectionist policies. The Royal Navy might have needed Krupp steel for armour plating but none of the railway and road bridges being built in the empire did. Why would steel companies invest heavily to supply steel for half a dozen battleships when they were doing quite nicely supplying steel to a captive market. I'm interested in the railways of Thailand, and Thailand - or Siam as it was - is interesting because it is one of a mere handful of Asian and African states that avoided colonisation by Europeans. Siam played Europeans off against each other when modernising the country. The first railway was in fact built by Danes, and it was the Germans who landed the first orders for locomotives and other hardware. (On my layout I can actually use Viesmann DB semaphores for the signals). The British didn't get a look in until a line was built south to link up with the railways in Malaya and orders for British locomotives peaked from 1916-20 after Siam's entry into WW1 on the Allied side. That shut off German competition. After WW1 though no more British railway equipment went to Thailand until the delivery of some Class 158 DMUs in the 1990s. British companies weren't building the right sort of locos, they didn't need to.

British governments did act, they went for something called "imperial preference", basically isolating the then extensive British empire from competition

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