LMS2968

It was in the 1830s. Henry Booth, Secretary and Treasurer of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, designed the first type, but I don't have an exact dat. The L&MR also had sprung buffers and drawgear.

Yes, when you tied a 40 down in the yard it was compulsory to scotch the wheels front and back. All that was then needed was for the driver to remember to remove the scotches before moving off!

No surprise there, then! The Class 40's braking ability was very poor: its 130 tons produced only 50 tons of brake force. As a guard in the early- to mid-1970s, I often had one at the front on a loose-coupled train; if memory serves the highest loading I had personally was a hardly exceptional 850 tons behind the 40. That brake van worked hard for its living as we came down the grade from Wigan through Prescot to Huyton and on to Edge Hill!

You'd be looking at about 400 tons, well within the constraints of a normal goods train. A brake wasn't necessary and Dallam Dave on Flickr has many photos of dead engines heading south. In one, there are three Black Fives with 8F 8006 bringing up the rear - no brake van. And the vacuum system would not be operable on an engine out of steam, except possibly as blow through..

The following is from the Ford Sidevalve Owners Club E83W Registrar: I first downloaded this photo from Facebook in May of 2020 but feel it has reappeared again since then. However the van is a railway built vehicle - body built and fitted to a chassis and skuttle (no doors) supplied by Fords at Dagenham, in one of British Railways' workshops. The reg according to my copy of Glass's is a London issue of likely 1954. I've attached a couple of photos of an identical 1951 van 884 FUF (originally OAR 2) kept at the Bluebell Railway which, as a Railway entrepreneur you may have likely already seen and may be familiar with. The railway hallmark of the body is the same. I do have a photo somewhere in our files but no can locate quickly and these are from an article published in the "Classic Van and Pickup" magazine of September 2004. I have to add this van is not on our Register as neither is OGT 606. So, origin is in any of the British Railways workshops and looking at the registration marks of both, somewhere in the London area. That's my best idea. Hope this is of use.

The sacked-up chimney was for engines in store, as The Johnster said, rather than those being moved to scrapyards. The were to prevent dirt, rain, etc. getting into the smokebox and, more especially, down the blastpipe into the cylinders; this wasn't a consideration if the engine was withdrawn and en route for scrapping. The connecting rods would certainly be removed but not always the coupling rods and there were several examples in Barry with these still in place. If the engine had been stored withdrawn on shed for some time, the fitters would almost certainly have helped themselves to some fittings to keep the still-in-service engines going; the faulty items might go to the scrapyard in the tender or bunker but would not have been refitted to the withdrawn engine. At first, all scrapping was performed at the BR works; it was only later when the supply of withdrawn engines overcame the works' ability to deal with them that private firms became involved in a big way. This started about 1963ish. The Pugs largely went earlier than this and, to the best of my knowledge and with the exception of those sold into industrial service years previously, were cut up at the works.

If you read Arthur Cook's Raising Steam on the LMS (1999) RCTS ISBN 0 901115 85 1, he goes into it very thoroughly. Basically, the boiler ratios were all over the place; the LMS D.O. was convinced that low resistance to gas flow gave better steaming and the tubes were simply too large in diameter for the boiler's length. That was probably the main issue but it wasn't the only one, and addressing any single one didn't necessarily provide an improvement, so that particular correction might then be abandoned. The final solution therefore took time to find. A.J. Powell in Stanier 4-6-0s at Work (1983) Ian Allan ISBN 0 7110 1342 X lists no less than seventeen variations of the Class 3A boiler. And even then, it wasn't the most reliable of steam raisers.

That appears to be the same one as used on the LMS right to the end, and possibly on the BR Standards too.

There are limits imposed on a locomotive steam plant that are not necessarily there with a a marine or land-based system. Steam pressure with a conventional fire tube boiler is realistically limited to about 300 p.s.i., 350 if you want to push your luck; not so with water tube boilers. With a turbine, the lubrication system can be kept well away from the steam circuit so steam temperature can go as high as you can get it; this isn't so in a reciprocating engine where cylinders and valves are in need of an oil feed and in direct contact with the steam. The effect on the oil (carbonisation) requires a limit on the steam temperature lower than theoretically desirable.

One of the problems with disposing of the deflector / baffle was it increased the tendency for spark throwing, and if you were reported as having started a lineside fire, the foreman would be waiting when you came back on shed and would check for the presence or otherwise of the offending item. If absent, the crew had some explaining to do.

Nominal T.E. is, at best, an indication of the force the engine can transmit to the rails at starting from rest; the actual T.E. available at that point might be very different as it is subject to constraints not included in the formula, adhesion being the main one. But the actual T.E. erodes exponentially as speed rises: Churchward's famous desideratum of a pull of two tons (4,480lb of T.E.) at 60 m.p.h. illustrates the point. Admittedly, this was at the drawbar rather than the wheel, but it still represents a substantial fall from the Nominal T.E. and the actual starting T.E.

Exhaust back pressure on the piston can be substantial and shows up as the lower line's height above the base line in an indicator diagram. An example from a Caprotti Black Five is shown, displaying both ends of the cylinder superimposed. The height above zero can be seen.

Looks like a firehole deflector plate to me. It sits in the firehole and deflects secondary air down towards the fire. In conjunction with the brick arch, it allows more efficient combustion.

Got to admit, it does sound a massive improvement for comparatively small changes.

Since the lamp with the shade removed was the one closest to the other running line, it would be fully visible. Having the sidelamps at the leading end of the van was quite common.

Doesn't matter. It's for the benefit of the enginemen to let them know the train's complete; the tail lamp does that for the bobby.

Yes, I noticed that too, but I assumed that ambient light was shining through the red shade at the rear. Normally, the engine crew would not see the red shade in daylight.

Probably, judging from the brake's carrying side lamps.

Yes, both of the two 5Xs!

And limits wheel size. This was the problem encountered when designing the later Stanier Pacifics: The biggest boiler possible was specified along with 6' 9" coupled wheels, and the top front corners of the firebox had to be drastically cut back to achieve it.

I don't think there is any suggestion of similarity below the running plate, and the boilers were very different also. Attention was mostly on the firebox, and as I said, there is a similarity in profile but not cross-section.

The LN and Scot fireboxes show similarities in profile but are very different in end view. Eric Langridge, a draughtsman at Derby, a was equally adamant that the Scot owed nothing to the LN design.

The original distance between the Liverpool & Manchester Railways Up and Down lines was 4' 8 1.2", reportedly to allow wide loads to run along the centre. What happened when the came to pointwork isn't explained, but wide loads were envisaged in the 1820s.

We have to deal with the practical, not the theoretical!

As engineers, we use indicator diagrams a lot, including for internal combustion engines. But you can also measure the TE on a rolling road or at the drawbar with a dynamometer car.