RLBH

Was that one not made obsolete by persuading the Civil Engineers to get their shovels out and improve the infrastructure to allow Black Fives on the line? Sadly that's normally the sensible approach to most cases of restricted branch lines needing specialised rolling stock. Unless you're up against a major restriction affecting a lot of the network (e.g. the British loading gauge being significantly smaller than UIC gauges), improving substandard bits to allow standard equipment to be used is a better choice in the long run.

For what it's worth, also the best shop in Glasgow for board games. There's probably as much board gaming as wargaming or roleplaying stuff in the shop – if not more!

Nobody seems to have cottoned on to the real explanation, which is that I made a mistake and wrote 2D2 where I should have written 2-Do-2. Though a hoofing great electric motor and coupling rods wouldn't be without precedent. The Stanier 5P Baltic tank is an impressive beast - but then I'm a sucker for a Baltic tank!

Wrong type of coal shipped by a clerical error somewhere along the chain? Or a siding further along the branch that can only be shunted from the Up direction, which seems more likely.

As noted, the express 2-Do-2 has an extra axle (and 600hp) more than the Raven EE1. A 2-Co-2 that's pretty much a ringer for the EE1 was proposed for lighter trains on the West Coast, but the Great Northern scheme involved fewer locomotives and providing two types was thought uneconomic. The ES1 was 640hp, so the 1931 proposal is only slightly more powerful - but has rather less tractive effort, which definitely suggests something slightly faster and capable of trip working to me. I've thought about it as an idea - I'd probably look to do somewhere like Doncaster, where electric, diesel and steam might mix. Needs a heck of a lot more room than I'm likely to have any time soon, though. To my mind, the logical extensions of Manchester-Sheffield-Wath are west to Liverpool (if the LMS will play nice), east to Immingham and Grimsby, and south only as far as Colwick. Grantham-Colwick was suggested for possible electrification by the British Rail 1951 motive power report, possibly linking in to Manchester-Sheffield-Wath. It's quite telling, in terms of traffic patterns, that there's no mention of continuing onwards from Grantham to Doncaster, Leeds or York. The diesel-electric order was for 25 single units, intended to work in pairs to replace 32 Pacifics on the principal expresses. There were 11 diagrams to be covered, needing 22 units, with a further three single units as spares. Each unit was to have been 57 feet long and weigh 120 tons, with a 1,600hp engine generating 1,200hp at the rails. Eight powered and four unpowered wheels per unit, so I suspect an A1A-A1A arrangement would have been chosen. For appearance, the EM2 is probably a good guess; it's also roughly the right size to use as a starting point.

It wasn't so much optimistic, as a study to find out what would be economic. As it turned out, the cost advantages on the main lines more than offset the capital expenditure on the minor branches, giving a modest 7.2% rate of return. The LMS Crewe-Carlisle study, by comparison, only electrified the main line, leading to poor asset utilisation, and a rate of return of just 2.5%. The finding was, in effect, that the entire network should be electrified over a period of 15 to 20 years, excepting only branch lines that were specifically shown to be more economically worked by non-electrified means. In other words, a presumption that everything should be electrified unless proven otherwise!

LNER thinking is quite clearly presented in the 1931 Weir Report - one of the case studies was wholesale electrification of the former Great Northern Railway, as in all of it. Even the marshalling yards. Consideration was given to only wiring those parts of the yards that main-line engines would use, and shunting with steam, but found that you had to wire up so much of the yard anyway that you might as well do the whole lot and get rid of steam entirely. The amount of rolling stock required for this was: 35 2,400hp 2D2 express passenger locomotives 193 1,200hp Bo-Bo goods locomotives 28 1,800hp Co-Co goods locomotives 42 1,800hp Co-Co mixed traffic locomotives, of which 14 to have electrically-fired boilers for train heat 138 720hp Bo-Bo shunting locomotives 258 three-car EMUs The express passenger locomotives were to be designed for 75mph, the goods locomotives for 35mph, and the mixed traffic would be goods locomotives regeared for 60mph and fitted with vacuum pumps. They were talking seriously about double-headed electric locomotives hauling 60-wagon unfitted coal trains, which is just mad! The Co-Co mixed traffic locomotives are actually a pretty good match for the EM1s, whilst the express passenger jobs compare well with the EM2s. Note the huge number of EMUs - the advantages of multiple unit traction were obvious even back then. The former LNER/Eastern Region does seem to have kept studying electrification, whilst the LMS/London Midland Region were pretty actively disinterested in it. A shame that the East Coast had to wait so long to finally benefit from all those studies.

The old road route from London to Scotland, some may recall, was via the Great North Road to Scotch Corner, then over Stainmore. There were legacies of this in road planning until relatively recently - the M6 was, at one point, expected to stop in Lancashire, with Anglo-Scottish traffic using the old route. Railways, of course, never did this. But what if they had? To get that to happen, we probably need to make some geographical tweaks. Let's suppose that the really high ground of the Lake District continued further south-east into the Yorkshire Dales. High enough, in fact, to make getting from the Eden Valley to the Lune Valley difficult by road, and virtually impossible by rail. Let's also suppose that Stainmore is a little lower. Not much, just a few hundred feet, but enought to make a difference. In this case, it's unlikely that the people of Penrith and Carlisle would look to Lancaster for commercial purposes. With the Pennines a more tractable barrier than the Howgill Fells, They would surely look to the east. It is likely, then, that the main line from London to Glasgow would follow the East Coast route as far as Northallerton, then run via Holmedale, following broadly the alignment of the South Durham & Lancashire Union railway to Penrith, then the West Coast route northwards. This would presumably put the Eden Valley and northern Cumbria into the hands of the North Eastern Railway, whilst southern Cumbria and Furness are in the hands of the London & North Western, the two railways likely competing over the Cumberland orefield. I can't imagine that the government would be keen on the North Eastern Railway having a monopoly on Anglo-Scottish traffic, but it's hard to see who else would take responsibility for the line. In time, the London & North Western might well push through a competing line up Longsleddale and under Gatescarth Pass to a junction at Penrith - a higher Shap presumably meaning a tunnel is needed, giving that route no cost advantage over Longsleddale. If the Midland has an appetite for its' own route, and in these circumstances I doubt if they would, then the route through Ingleton and under Shap is probably going to be more cost-effective than going over Ais Gill. What does that mean from a railway development viewpoint? In truth, I'm not quite sure. From a modelling perspective, it could be used to justify all manner of strange goings-on; there would be more traffic on the East Coast, less on the West, different motive power requirements. Maybe the prospective Anglo-Scottish monopoly sees railway nationalisation in the 1850s, though probably not.

Yes - I thought I'd mentioned that the big Garratt was to have been a 4-6-2+2-6-4, with all the best features proved on Beyer-Garratt's export work. Even a relatively modest axle loading of 20 tons 10 cwt, so not too harsh on the track either.

Realistically, I think it's going to be hard to materially improve on A. J. Powell's Garratt built on running gear from the first Black Fives, precisely for the purpose of dragging heavy (20-coach) passenger trains over Shap and Beattock. As it was devised by a professional steam engineer - albeit as a flight of fancy - I think we can safely assume that it would have been a practical locomotive for the work intended. This locomotive would also be very useful on fast goods work, for instance the Condor that was booked for a pair of Type 2 diesels but often wound up with a pair of Class 5 4-6-0s instead. It's easy to imagine a dedicated goods version bearing a similar relationship to the Powell Garratt as a Stanier 8F does to a Black Five. This would be a 2-8-2+2-8-2 Garratt with 56.5" drivers, presumably also built in very small numbers, and fully capable of handling 60-wagon goods trains (i.e. 1,500 tons) on the toughest jobs. In effect, this is a main-line version of the LNER U1 of comparable size and tractive effort. On something like the famous Birmingham to Glasgow overnight goods - 55 12-ton vans, fully fitted, over Ais Gill - this would eat a 9F for breakfast. Of course, 9Fs did the work just fine, and Coronations did just fine on the passenger jobs, so these monsters would certainly be uneconomic. But they'd look spectacular as they wasted money!

I believe there was some interest from the LMS in a big 2-6-2, but that never came to pass; the point is, though, that the rule-of-thumb indicates that a big British 2-6-2 tender locomotive would probably be appropriate for the type of work a 2-8-4 was used for in North America. Just as 2-8-2s didn't really take off, nor did 2-6-2s, due to operational conditions on our railways. The equivalent to our mixed traffic 4-6-0s would, then, be a 4-8-2 - which were indeed used extensively as mixed traffic and fast freight locomotives in the United States; the Britannia perhaps equates to some of the smaller-drivered American 4-8-4s that were intended for similar heavy mixed traffic work. It's a rule of thumb, rather than a law of nature, but one that I think helps with making fairer comparisons between the state of the art in locomotive design and in traffic conditions. Comparing British and American 2-8-2s (say) isn't terribly informative, because on this side of the Atlantic they were some of the biggest and most powerful locomotives, whilst the American ones were a smallish, go-anywhere, do-anything type of locomotive. Similarly, a British 2-6-2T would be completely lost on an American railroad - they'd probably use a 2-8-4T for similar work, except that such locomotives were't built. They use tender locomotives instead.

A (very rough) rule of thumb I've come up with for comparing British and American tender locomotives is this: equivalent roles warrant an extra driving axle and trailing axle on the American locomotive, and the American locomotive has an axle load about 50% higher. By way of example: The British equivalent of the big-boilered 2-8-4s with 6-foot wheels is then a big-boilered 2-6-2 with 6-foot wheels. Or in other words, an LNER V2. Their ultimate passenger locomotive was a 4-8-4, whilst ours was a 4-6-2; exactly which ones is of course rather contentious!

There is a third reason, one which explains the American preference for relatively large drivers even on what they call 'drag' freight - balancing. When you have large reciprocating masses, as is inevitable on a large two-cylinder locomotive, you need large balancing weights even at relatively low speeds. Small wheels simply don't have space for the required wheel weights to balance the reciprocating weight on a really big locomotive!

BR seems to have felt similarly. As I recall, the Class 5 Pacific would have been twelve tons heavier and had an extra set of wheels and bearings to maintain, for no particular advantage. Which is why it was dropped in favour of a 4-6-0.

But where does the modeller decide that his/her degree of precision is sufficient? The accepted tolerance in installing the real thing may have been (say) half an inch. At 1:76 scale, that's an error of about one-sixth of a millimetre. The valve gear must surely have been made to much finer tolerances than that. Sooner or later, we all decide that we're accurate enough. For some people, the joy is in pushing accuracy to the limits of the tools. Fair play to them. For others, it's in making something that looks fairly similar to the prototype then using it to shuffle wagons around. Which is perfectly okay too. But if you insist that everything must exactly replicate the prototype down to the tiniest detail, you start needing to install working gauges in the cab - and that way, madness lies. The trick, I think, is in recognising that you have made that decision about how much accuracy is enough accuracy, being honest about it, and sticking to that decision.

I could just about conceive of it being done if the shafts were too long for a BG and they absolutely had to be moved at express passenger speeds. I don't consider either of those things likely, but strange things can happen in wartime. What I suspect would be done is that the shaft, in its' packing case, would be laid down the gangway of the coach (so probably limited to one, unless seats were removed or they could be stcked), the packing case secured, and the coach locked out of use. I can't see it being a desirable way to transport them, but it may have been done occasionally if more suitable stock wasn't available.

I think such a machine is more credible as a tender than a tank locomotive, probably for exactly those reasons; main line work for a handful of big 8-coupled tank engines probably existed, hence the GWR 72xx class, but not much, else there would have been more like them! As a tender locomotive, the Riddles 8F 2-8-0 makes perfect sense - use a 5MT boiler and cylinders and 60" drivers from the 9F, you get similar tractive effort to a Stanier 8F but slightly higher speeds and better balancing. It all fits together quite nicely. There's definitely work for something like this, but there are also the best part of a thousand ex-War Department 2-8-0s that work perfectly well. For Consett and Ebbw Vale, there's the Durrant 2-14-2T, or better yet a 2-8-2+2-8-2 Garratt.

If true, I suspect that the design logic was to accommodate the largest indivisible load that might plausibly need to be accommodated in a brake van.

Wasn't there a Gresley 2-8-2T (possibly to be classed P10) that was never built?

Oddly enough, a 5MT 4-6-4T is something I keep playing around with. It would definitely be an imposing (and capable) locomotive. I fear that weight would be its' downfall, though - Baltic tanks kept falling foul of it in Britain. It would, however, naturally lead to a 2-8-4T version with 60" drivers, which would be a seriously imposing machine for short-distance heavy freight work. I don't think there's much point in a 4-6-4T based on the Standard Class 4 4-6-0, because that's basicaly just a Class 4 2-6-4T with a four-wheeled bogie at either end. It might get you longer legs, I suppose, but that's about all.

Wildly off-topic, but this must be an advantage of the induction-based cab signalling developed in the United States and used in (amongst others) Ireland - condition of the wheel/rail interface is less critical if data isn't transmitted over it.

Being swapped periodically with another locomotive, allowing for maintenance to be done at the bigger depot in the provincial centre. And not coincidentally, justifying owning more than one locomotive for a one-engine-in-steam branch line!

One can't help but wonder if fully compensated suspension, as employed by American railroads, would have helped with weight transfer causing slipping.

Came across the Ruhnian State Railways today - a creation of a German modeller and steam enthusiast. http://www.kropplenburg.de/rsr/pages/rsrhome.html There's a bit of context on the site, but the best developed feature is the locomotives page. All imaginary, and some of them really quite inventive. The story holds that the RSR has stuck with steam up to the present day, leading to barmy things like a 7-cylinder triple-expansion 2-12-4.

If you run the power car in parallel with the overhead electrics, yes, you'll get plenty of power - if you used Class 390-type traction motors it's perfectly possible to beat 2,000hp in the motor coach alone. But running a big diesel under the wires seems to defeat the point of having this kind of bodged together bi-mode.