Compound2632

On another tack, most of the advertising space is taken up with full-pagers for Railex, ExpoEM and Scalefour North, so the by now customary advert for a certain forthcoming wagon book is conspicuous by its absence.

Can I ask you guys a basic question? For Gauge 3 and 5" gauge, what scale are you working to? Either as mm/ft or a ratio? 5" gauge sounds as if it started out being 1/12 scale but I can't believe you can be putting up with the wide gauge at the level of detail you're working to.

Oh dear.

Almost certainly not a helpful remark for anyone looking to buy a semi in suburban Brum these days... Interesting, though, that it was on a par with Oxford prices at the time!

The back cover of the latest Midland Railway Society Journal will be just the thing to have to hand when your new neighbours call round! In fact here it is but unfortunately reproduced too small for the blurb to be legible. Perhaps you'll need a gallery - some more examples:

I agree absolutely! And indeed as you said superheating reduced the appetite for coal of the George the Fifth and Prince of Wales classes over the Precursors and Experiments, which were the worst offenders.

The relatively recent demise (43 years ago!) of the 1881 Crewe Works replica seems rather shocking as it would have been an historic artefact in its own right. Is the fate of the 1930 LMS replica known? The Dearborn and Chicago replicas are on display, according to a quick web search, but I couldn't find the 1892 replica or the Museum of Peaceful Arts.

That's all right. I was merely showing off my pretensions to high literary culture which are a bit second hand anyway as it's really Mrs Compound who is the Jamesian. I have read some James but a good long while ago - heavy going even then. I recall George Orwell claimed to have abolished use of the semi-colon in his writing; he was behind the times - Henry James got close to abolishing the full stop.

At this period - early 80s, I can recall WCML trains made up of Mk 2d/e/f FO and TSOs with a Mk 3 buffet and Mk 1 BG - but this was in the Lune valley so possibly going via the Trent Valley rather than Brum. In the late 80s the Bournemouth-Manchester trains were Mk 1 BG / Mk 2d/e/f FO / Mk 1 RB / 3 or 4? x Mk 2d/e/f TSO / Mk 2d/e/f BSO. I used to aim for the Sussex Scot from Oxford to Brum - taking care to sit in the Edinburgh portion, which tended to be more salubrious. I can't recall how these were made up or whether there was first class accommodation in both portions. 47s south of Brum of course, though some may have changed engines at Coventry?

That step change is called the corridor carriage. Express passenger train weights went up at least 30% per seat. As far as I've been able to work out from my reading, the supposed "Derby syndrome" is too general a term. It seems to come down to the different outlook of individuals in the Derby drawing office. There were some very forward-thinking engineers there - most of the elements of the 4P 2-6-4T, generally regarded as a highly successful design, were already being proposed in the Edwardian era but at that time what actually came out was the 0-6-4T. S.W. Johnson had been very open to innovation throughout his career - an early adopter of piston valves, for instance. He'd risen to the challenge of the corridor carriage by a total break with his previous standard designs in the Belpaire and Compound 4-4-0s; on the goods side, it was he who approved the H boiler version of the 0-6-0 and had a 0-8-0 on the go at his retirement. So the Derby drawing office in 1900 was a go-ahead place; subsequent events conspired to cramp the style of its most forward-looking engineers. Not least amongst these events was the start of the decline in profitability of the railways in the Edwardian/pre-War years. Re. Churchward, while conditions remained static his standard components continued to assemble into highly satisfactory engines. In the even more radically changed conditions of the post-WWII era, they required some re-working to achieve optimum performance.

The coal consumption of Whale's engines was certainly high on the agenda for the locomotive men at the Conciliation Boards in 1909 - the first Government attempt at industrial arbitration and broadly a good thing from the employees' point of view - though key members of LNWR management such as Herbert Walker and C.J. Bowen-Cooke come out of it well too [R. Preston Hendry and R. Powell Hendry, The North Western at Work (Patrick Stephens, 1990)].

Digging around on The Railway Children's Strines connection, I found this rather entertaining article - including the threat of literary war between the K&WVR and the librarians of New Mills. Edward Ross, proposed candidate for the 'Old Gentleman', was Secretary to the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway from 1850 until his death in 1892. Given his position and later Marple connections, I'd bet he was one of the occupants of the MS&L dog-cart on that fateful day in 1861! On the subject of the MS&L and gambling, its Chairman in 1861 was Charles Anderson Worsley Anderson-Pelham, Second Earl of Yarborough. A hand at Bridge (or in his day Whist) containing no card higher than a nine is named a Yarborough after him. The story goes that having been dealt such a hand, he offered to pay £1,000 to anyone dealt another, on condition they pay him £1 for every hand played. He'd worked out that the odds on such a hand are 1:1,828. I'd wondered how such an astute statistician could have got involved with such a dicey concern as the MS&L* until I read that he owned large swathes of Lincolnshire. What he lost on his investment in the railway he would more than gain from the increased value and return his estates would yield from their access to the railway! *MS&L = Money Sunk and Lost; GC = Gone Completely. EDIT: Three Chimneys is now a fully-licensed cattery. What is the state of the law on supplying alcohol to other people's pets?

Alex, the test of any literary thesis is whether it survives application to Henry James - vide A.D. Nuttall, Openings (OUP, 1992). How does What Maisie Knew fit into your analysis? Then there's the whole question of audience: is writing about children for children or for adults? C.S. Lewis and Edith Nesbit might be considered here. Nesbit is particularly interesting as perhaps the first to write for children without a didactic moral purpose, and hence without condescension. And, just to give us a bit of cross-thread convergence, Strines has been mentioned as a location inspiring The Railway Children.

My impression is that at the Grouping, all the major LMS constituents - LNW/L&Y, Midland, Caledonian - were struggling to produce express passenger engines that met their Traffic Departments' demands. On the English lines at least, part of the problem was with the Civil Engineering side. On the LNW, this was down to a lack of understanding of the dynamic effects of a locomotive at speed - the George the Fifth class were more destructive of the permanent way than the four-cylindered Claughtons would have been if Bowen Cooke had been allowed to give them the boiler he wanted. On the Midland, the issue was more simply one of weak underbridges. Deeley had wanted to introduce compound 4-6-0s, and even on the goods side, Johnson's parting shot was a 0-8-0 that was cancelled as soon as he retired. The LNW engines were notorious for their high coal consumption.

They satisfactorily performed the tasks for which they were designed, as did the L1s. Different tasks.

As in the drawing of Comet. But there was perhaps some trial and error here? After all, the early Wylam engines were coupled. Re. the Rocket replica: the NMR one dates from 1979 but there must have been an earlier one, possibly built for the centenary of the Liverpool & Manchester; it's most often seen alongside Coronation in 1938 - as seen here at 4:27 - Lion in action later.

Well no, because house price inflation has greatly outstripped general inflation. Using a general inflation calculator, £4,000 in 1964 would be around £80,000 today - roughly 20x.

He's out and about in his dog cart plotting routes to Manchester: That'll be the Memsahib and Miss Tabitha with him.

Exactly so. It was an era of livery simplification, as you say. Even on the Midland, lining out of the solebars of carriages was abandoned about this time.

Which engines? The 483 Class / standard 2P or the engines of the Johnson era? The latter I don't believe as a 4-4-0, a 4-2-2, and a 2-4-0 (all with the same front end except that the 4-2-2 in question had piston valves) appear in the select group of locomotives recorded at over 80mph in the 19th century [O.S. Nock, Speed Records on Britain's Railways (David & Charles, 1971)]. The speed-limiting effect of the combined reverser for a all but the first two Compounds is well-known, so not those, I presume.

Well, why do you think so many railways went for variations on dark lake, Great Western included?

Countless - princeless!

Well, I thought the interesting point was that the Stephensons built a second Rocket, of the Northumbrian type with enclosed firebox, and that this engine, rapidly become obsolete itself, was provided in an emergency for the opening of the Leicester & Swannington, that being where the sketch was made. Although the tale as told is a bit circumstantial and at second hand, those railwaymen writing to The Engineer in 1884 did have the advantage of being very much closer in time to events than are we. The identity of a locomotive? Frames were certainly renewed or exchanged, cylinders and crank axles renewed - I don't think there's any component that might not be replaced. A locomotive's identity is on paper - the Engine Record Card or similar document, or even the company accountant's records.

Opened in 1907, I glean with the aid of the internet. There seems to be a large - and unexploited? - photographic collection held by the National Archives. The very nicely restored tricomposite was built at Gorton, I read, but that was early on - 1876.

I think that sums up the situation with pre-Grouping design generally and is the fundamental reason why the LMS's early attempts at standardisation ran into some difficulties. Of course there were some lame ducks among the pre-Grouping engines and some places were the standard designs - especially the 2P and 4P 4-4-0s in SW Scotland - were successes, especially with the locomotive men (a prerequisite for success generally). My chemistry teacher at school many, many years ago - early 80s - was a member of the 8F Soc.