Mr_Tilt

What Andy Y and Titan said. The Aero guys used the probe to measure the airspeed far enough ahead of the nose cone so that the airstream was not disturbed by the train itself. At Shildon we've got the hole covered by a perspex disc so that the H&S guys don't get upset because kids could be tempted to stick their fingers in the hole.... The 'Not to be moved' sign was used on the train during the ASLEF blacking after our first run, but it wasn't there for long before it went over to the Loco Works for Rebuild 1. The train also had another 'device' that looks a little odd too and it appears in a number of photos at the time. I've ringed it in red in the photo below, so would anyone care to hazard a guess what it is, or what it's for? Andy and Paul are banned from guessing though.....

The York trip was many years after the train's life with BR though, and needed some 'negotiations' when we suggested coupling both Power Cars together to do it.

It COULD have been hauled by any standard loco, but it wasn't intended to be normal practice. There's a removeable panel just under the nose, clearly visible now it's a Shildon as the replacement panel hasn't been painted, and we carried a long tow bar in TC1 that connected between a standard loco's coupling and the end of the crash jack that was under the cab floor. Actually it's just occured to me that it WAS hauled by a standard loco once, when the train was taken to the Loco Works for Rebuild 1 after the first run, it was hauled by an 08 shunter manned by Inspectors, thus causing the one day strike by ASLEF. You can see where the panel went in the pic below, and you can just see the end of the crash jack inside the nose cone.

That's actually going to happen, the book is mentioned on the Rapido web site. I've written an 11000 word (17 A4 pages without photos!) shortish history of the project and Paul is doing another section on the preservation of the train. They'll need a bit of fettling and smoothing I expect but it's under way. The 4" x 4" and the support brackets were needed to level the Power Cars. As the tilt system is de-pressurised and we didn't have any of the proper anti-tilt brackets it was falling over. Some people had tried to stop it by wedging odd lumps of timber under the sides but they'd put them in the wrong place so the body was distorting. So we fitted the big timber supports about two years ago, which was very successfull in leveling the Power Car. Subsequently Paul found one of the original brackets hiding in PC1 so we're going to make some new ones, and four modfiied ones for the Trailer Cars, so that the whole train will be a lot more stable.

E-Train wasn't, it only ever moved under its own power, or hauled by the Unimog in the RTC Yard. POP-Train was hauled by a variety of main line stuff, Class 25, 45, 46, 47, 86, 86/1, 87/1 AND the blasted Class 17, as well as the Unimog too. Thanks for the enthusiastic response to the vid, we in the Conservation and Support Group are very pleased at the response. And if any Model Railway Clubs need an odd-ball lecture I can do my APT story in short (1.5 hrs) long (2.5 hrs) and 'Is he ever going to stop' lengths.

I better check the logbooks again..........

It would make an interesting weathering job, wouldn't it? E-Train usually looked reasonably pristine, but now and then, usually after a long session at Old Dalby, we'd return to Derby looking a bit grubby and Ron Puntis' team would descend on the train en masse and clean and polish for a day or so.

If it's exactly 1/76 scale, and it seems it may be, it'll be 1153 mm long. That's scaled down from the real thing's dimensions. I feel you're being more than harsh there. The background noise level in the Shildon Loco Shed is horrendous, especially when the 'Station Announcer' does her thing. There were only two guys from BRM there and they were both working flat out to cover the event. Plus everyone and their mother was galloping around the place and we'd have needed a large team of crowd controllers to keep them in place. All the barriers that were available were being used to keep the aforesaid people (and their mothers...) from the 3D scanning area anyway.

PC1's second wiper got smacked by a bird on one of the very last test track runs and it broke off, but I thought we'd fixed it before the York run. Seemingly not so.

3 minutes of arc? Close counts............. On the subject of rivet counting here's a pic of Bill Schneider doing exactly that on PC2.

The photo at Swindon was as far west as we got, St. Pancras was as far east, just a tad further east than Melton Mowbray, Hayes on the WR main line was as far south and about 1/2 mile north of the NRM York was as far north as we travelled, at least under turbine power. The two Power Cars did get further north than that when we moved them from the NRM to the Thrall Yard but that was with Class 08 power. There was radio connection with the Old Dalby Control Centre all the time we were within range, which usually happened as we came round Syston Curve on a good day. There were also some radio hand-sets on the same net which we used to talk to the guys manning Upper Broughton Curve to ensure they were a] safely out of the way and b] that the track load instrumentation was working OK. I had one of the hand-sets on the middle weekend of the WR runs which I used to find out where the train actually was when I was taking the photographs. The Station Manager at Didcot was SERIOUSLY impressed when I asked him if the train had passed by on Run 2 that weekend and he said he didn't know where it was, so I radioed the train and found out. The train was always 'Railtest 1' and I was 'Railtest 5' that day.

Actually it wasn't. That photo at Swindon was taken either on Tue 22nd July or Thurs 24th on the first WR runs just before our first high speed weekend down there. The 252 was in service from Paddington to Bristol at the time and we had a path between the HST and the following service train as we could run at up to 125 mph without the chance of catching up with any traffic in front on the weekday runs. The HST should have left Swindon by the time we got there, but it was a bit delayed and we just MAY have gone a bit faster than 125 so both trains ended up there at the same time. I think the BR publicity guys may have been the cause of the HST's delay though, there were a lot of them hanging around Swindon every time we got there.

I almost hate to tell you this but E-Train had that Electrolevel sensor fitted too, from the very start! We also used them on POP-Train and Hastings Coach too. The signal from that sensor tripped the systems into switching channels if the working one failed.

That's very interesting Rob, thanks for posting it. Did all the vehicles in all three trains have it fitted? And do the bolsters have the holes in the centre for the pin that I mentioned? It was around 3" across on the test rig that we had in the Dynamics Lab. The H4X bogies on Hastings Coach don't have the hole, but they were the very first P-Train geometry bogies to be built.

Actually the Power Cars really DID droop. For the high speed and subsequent runs there was an aerodynamic advantage in having the nose run lower than before so the E1 power bogie air springs had their ride height lowered by about 1 - 2 ", which became known as 'Sport Mode'.

The wheelbase of the E1 power bogie is 3.17 metres, for the E1T trailer bogies it's 2.7 metres and the bogies are 15.5 metres apart. The original Swinging Arm trailer bogies, which were only used on the first run, had a wheelbase of 2.7 metres

He says it won't be as fast or as abrupt at previous attempts at tilting OO gauge models. By that I'm thinking that they have a non-linear connection between the curve radius and the tilt angle.

In Andy's video above Jason says it won't be, which sounds good, and must be tricky to manage as well.

I believe so. There wasn't anything technically wrong with the P-Train design that couldn't have been developed out, or changed for a subsequent 'S-Train' design, S standing for 'Service'. I'm not sure that the placing of the secondary air springs above the tilt platform was such a good idea, but I understand why they did it that way, and I think that would have been changed for S-Train. The biggest problem with P-Train was that there was only three of them, and even the CM&EE wanted five sets to give a decently paced development programme. As a result the very people who denied them the money for the two extra trains then gave them a tough time when the development pace wasn't fast enough! That's what happens when the crucial decisions on engineering programmes are made by politicians and accountants. The reason why the two Power Cars were in the middle was pretty much as 'newbryford' says. It needed the 8000 bhp to run with 12 coaches up Shap and Beattock and that needed two locos. BR's very simple catenery system wasn't (and still isn't...) stiff enough in the vertical plane to allow two pantographs being up at the same time, the leading one sets up a standing wave in the wire so that the second one is only in contact maybe 30% of the time. As mentioned before there was no confidence at the time of jumpering 25 kV right along the train, and they weren't confident of propelling 12 cars at speed with 8000 bhp. Thus the Power Cars in the middle. As 'The Stationmaster' says the SNCF, and most other o'head systems, use a much stiffer catenary design, and you can see that just by looking at them, there are many more 'layers' of suspension cable and more diagonals too. Nowadays we know that jumpering 25 kV isn't a problem, but that was 35 years ago...

To clear up the business about what happened to the P-Train tilt system without power, it WOULDN'T fall over for sure, and neither would it take up random angles. The geometry of the suspension was such that any of the various P-Train vehicles, including the Power Cars, would tilt back so that their floors were parallel with the track in a power failure situation. At one stage there was a plan to have a hydraulic or pneumatic powered locking pin to lock the tilting bolster in place under those conditions but I'm pretty sure it was never installed on the three trains. It was possible for the tilt system to fail in a tilted position, but only hard over one way or the other and it would have been the work of moments to kill the power to the vehicle's tilt pack when it would pendelum back to the 'horizontal'. And yes, if the E-Train tilt system failed it would fall over, and quite often did in the early days! That was a result of the need to produce the highest possible tilt rate, 9 deg/sec in the case of E-Train, but later developments of 'partiallly compensated' systems meant we didn't need that high a rate eventually. Thanks for finding that other Beeston photo Paul, I don't have it for some reason. The turbine sound from the Leyland Gas Turbine Truck is pretty close, especially the higher pitched 'hiss' that comes over, but as it's a mechanical drive the low frequency 'roar' tends to rise and fall more than it did on E-Train. When E-Train started moving the 'roar' and the 'hiss' came to a peak together and tended to stay that way as the driver notched up.

Ahah, so there are, thanks.

That should be 'seated passengers's hip height' in my post above, but I can't find out how to edit posts.

We do indeed, see below, but it could be anywhere as there's not much of Beeston itself that's visible.I also took one one showing the tanker alongside E-Train which is in Hugh William's book but I can't find it on my laptop or the original 35 mm either. Re tilting in 1/76 :- While using modern sub -miniature servos would be just about practical in this scale pre-programming the tilt smacks too much of how a Pendelino works to me, but then I am biased somewhat. It also limits the tilting to DCC layouts and DC operators would feel a bit short changed. There'd still be the issue of the tilt geometry, the real thing had a 'virtual tilt axis' that was around a passenger's hip height, and that was obtained by using swing links inside the bogies as well as the ball joint on the ends of the Steering Beams. I'm not at all sure that's practical in 1/76.

It may be difficult to use anything OTHER than the Hornby 'Tilt on curving' system in a scale as small as 1/76. It'd be just impractical to make it work exactly as the real thing, a 1/76 scale servo valve would be about 1.5 mm square after all! Making it tilt pendulum wise, like a Talgo or a TurboTrain, wouldn't be realistic either as the model would really have to be moving to get it to swing out on the curves and it would need a pivot point up near the roof, the exact opposite of where it needs to be to be accurate.

Aaaaaghhhhh, the Clayton ! Its front engine caught fire when I was mile-post spotting in the cab southbound on the test track once. The secondman grabbed an extinguisher and swung himself out of the cab onto the footplate and zapped the fire through the access doors! We didn't even slow down from the giddy 30 mph we were doing.... The E-Train's turbine sound was quite a bit higher pitched than a UP Big Blow, perhaps because there were ten small turbines as opposed to one giant one? I always thought E-Train sounded like a Boeing 707 from the outside, at least if you were on the lineside listening to it run by rather than standing alongside it with the engines running.