whart57

Dirty Old Town - Ewan MacColl

What shall we do with the drunken sailor? - Traditional

Streets of London -- Ralph McTell

Those were the days -- Mary Hopkin (IMO anyone who puts up a one word title is honour bound to provide the next one too)

Days - Kinks, though Kirsty MacColl was the better version

Oh what a circus, oh what a show -- Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita)

Ol' Man River - Kerr and Hammerstein, from Showboat

I've just had a read in Waldorp, the "Bible" for Dutch railway steam, to see if he says why Netherlands Railways built big heavy tank engines. Or more accurately got Henschel, Hohenzollern and Beyer Peacock to do it for them. The Dutch had their "Grouping" in 1921 when the Holland Railway and the State Railway came together. I mention this because each had their own reasons for having big tank engines. The Holland Railway operated busy commuter lines from Amsterdam to the Gooi (i.e. Hilversum, Bussum etc, a sort of Dutch NW Surrey). They needed powerful engines for the heavy trains as the stops were frequent and so were the services. These lines would be among the first to be electrified but in pre-WW1 days that wasn't an option. The distance was not great, about 40km, so water capacity was not an issue and thus tenders more of a nuisance than a necessity The State Railway (actually the privately operating company (SS) of the railways built by the state, franchising is not that new) was responsible for the coal traffic from Limburg. Limburg is where all the Netherlands' hills are so gradients were stiff. The SS liked the extra weight of tank engines for the extra adhesion offered and that's why they built these monsters. The NS 4-8-4T I referred to earlier was a post fusion design continuing the SS tradition. It was also the last steam locomotive to be built for Dutch railways, not counting the post 1945 emergency acquisitions.

Moon River - Audrey Hepburn

Climb every mountain - Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sound of Music

Sunrise, Sunset - from Fiddler on the Roof, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnett

Triang described the L1 as a "maid of all work" in their booklet The First 10 Years. That's an interesting pitch and it does reflect the changing state of railway modelling in the late fifties, early sixties period. We started this mini-thread discussing the Hornby R1 and how it signalled a move away from the express passenger bias of the model train market. Triang had Princesses, Britannias, BofB Pacifics, Hornby added the A4 and Castle. In the modelling magazines though the West Country branch line terminus was starting to become the favourite. Was there a plan at Triang to provide the sort of medium sized loco that was more typical of passenger trains than the top link Pacifics? At the time the Kent Coast trains from Margate and Ramsgate (just before electrification in 1959) would have been hauled by U1s mostly, but the locals to Dover via Deal and Ashford via Canterbury West would very likely have had an L1 or the visually similar D1 and E1 in front. Anyway, to get back to "Imaginary Locomotives" how about a Wainwright Atlantic in full SECR livery? Again, the story and a weight diagram are in Bradley's book.

There are a couple on eBay for what looks like a reasonable (i.e. not silly) price

The sun whose rays are all ablaze. - from the Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan

I may be wrong but didn't Triang produce the S initially as a clockwork loco. We forget these days that there were still parts of the country on DC mains electricity in the 1950s which meant transformers couldn't be used. Even in AC areas there wasn't necessarily a socket in every room and of course electricity was considered to be very dangerous. Battery controllers were produced for the same reason. An overscale saddle tank would have been the only way to accommodate the clockwork mechanism in OO gauge. The L1 was a lovely model, one of the best of its time but it didn't sell well. That's where Triang went wrong with their marketing. Had they done a Midland 4-4-0 instead they would have flown out of the door.

The SER and LCDR had two different philosophies for locomotives. The SER was far more standardised, with limited numbers of loco classes. This started with Cudworth, at the end of his time two thirds of locos were in just two classes, and continued with Stirling. On the LCDR under Kirtley the philosophy was more continuous improvement, so you had variants such as M1, M2, M3 for different batches of 4-4-0 express loco. Kirtley's predecessor Martley was not in the fortunate position of ever considering standard classes, he had to have a policy of bargain buying just to get any locos. What this meant was that in 1899 it was the LCDR that had the more modern engines, albeit only in small numbers. So the SECR C was an improved LCDR B2, the D was basically an M3 carried out more artistically and when passenger tanks were urgently needed before the new locomotive department could get to work it was the LCDR R1 and not the SER Q chosen to have a few more built. Conversely, it was the standardised SER locos that lasted longest in the joint company

You really got me - Kinks

Run rabbit run -- Flanagan and Allan

In which case they skimped on their research. The Wainwright R1 - not to be confused with the ex-LCDR 0-4-4T R1 - was rarely if ever seen near Margate. Apart from the London carriage sidings the other two stamping grounds of R1s were the short Folkestone Harbour branch - where Rs and R1s operated double, triple even quadruple headed trains up the slope to the mainline - and the Whitstable Harbour line which had been closed by then and used locos with cut down funnels, cabs and other boiler features in order to squeeze through Tyler Hill tunnel. Now neither Whitstable nor Folkestone is that far from Margate but the point is that these locos were dedicated to those branches and not available to wander round Kent.

I'd say almost certainly. The wheels of an H are bigger so the main change would be to cut down the front splashers. Underneath the footplate the wheelbase is different, not just the wheel arrangement. The H coupled wheelbase is 7'6" with 5'6" wheels, the C, and thus this loco is 8'0" + 8'6" with 5'2" wheels. The H body may need packing up a bit to get buffers at the right height depending on chassis chosen.

Setting aside the inaccuracies of the Wrenn R1 - it does date from the 1950s after all being one of Hornby Dublos first forays into 2-rail - that loco class would have the right boiler and had the pagoda cab that the proposed 0-6-2T would presumably have had. (One of the curiosities of 1950s/60s RTR is that the company based in Liverpool chose a small class of tank engines from the deep South for their basic 0-6-0T while the company who were based in the county where those locos actually operated chose something more Northern. OK, Midland, but to Kent that is "northern")

To come back to the SE&CR's 0-6-2T that never was, according to Bradley's book the need for a loco of this sort was raised at the Locomotive Committee. Bradley doesn't expand on the reasons but we can surmise two things. One is that the SE&CR had a lot of freight workings in the London area - including transfers over what is now the Thameslink connection - which were short in length and thus didn't need the coal and water capacity of a tender and, given the absence of turntables across much of the suburban network, involved a lot of tender-first running. The recollections of loco crews active back then was that running tender-first was very unpleasant, crews were bathed in gritty coal dust the whole time, so we can also surmise that the loco crews were complaining. On the other hand management, including the CME Wainwright, felt these tank engines wouldn't be flexible enough as they couldn't suddenly be rostered for a Ramsgate goods. Eventually management won the argument, though the plans got far enough to allocate a class description - N class - and reserve six numbers in the loco list. So this Class C with presumably H class cab, tanks and bunker, is a might have been that nearly was.

I presume that this is the inspiration for the "Flying Kipper" in the Awdry books

Wired for Sound. - Cliff Richard

I thought I'd check up on the locomotives imagined by Ashford Works in the early years of the last century, and in D L Bradley's "bible" found this copy of a works drawing for an 0-6-2T based on the Wainwright C Hattons have some second hand Bachmanns ...............