34116 Broadwoodwidger

They'd have been fine... thirty years earlier. Over twenty years after the Churchward 2800s and also postdating the Gresley O2? Absolutely not fine. Add in the useless 1850s size bearings, short travel valves, poor steaming... they were garbage.

There are a few points here which are incorrect. Firstly, with broader rail gauges, the efficiency of haulage goes up, not down, which is why 5ft 6in was adopted as the standard across the Indian subcontinent, from the Afghan border to Sri Lanka, as well as most of South America. Wider locomotive frame spacing means you can fit bigger inside cylinders and maintenance access is somewhat easier, while wider vehicles means that, for any given tonnage of payload (be it freight or passenger), the rolling resistance is lower. The problem with getting railways built in the US is one of capitalism and the powerful airline and automotive lobbies campaigning against any kind of improved rail services. Here in the UK, the Victorian governments frequently DID fund railway schemes, providing loans to investors, many of which were never repaid as schemes foundered or companies went bankrupt. The railway map of the UK looks the way it does not because of geography but because of ego and greed. The SER/LCDR idiocy is just one example. Brunel showed that he could overcome and subjugate geography when he wanted to, and it wasn't long before locos capable of climbing the Devon Banks, or Shap, came about. Yes, I know about the failed Atmospheric experiment in South Devon, the legacy of which is a tightly curving line which even HSTs and IEPs remain speed restricted on, hence my desire to seek an alternative route to Plymouth. Also, trial and error with locomotive designs generally did not work. An infamous example is the Midland Railway - by the late 19th century, their locomotive architecture (wheelbase dimensions, axlebox sizes etc) was already inadequate, and their designs only became ever more obsolete and unreliable with the passage of time, culminating in the truly dreadful 7F 0-8-0 of 1927, which was just the biggest parallel boiler they could fit in the loading gauge atop an eight-wheeled version of the standard six-wheel locomotive chassis they'd been using since the 1850s. The 4F 0-6-0 and 2P 4-4-0 were almost as useless. Bear in mind that the "Austin Sevens" arrived over twenty years after the Churchward 2-8-0 which remained the mainstay of the GWR for fifty years for the simple reason that, until the 9F, nothing better existed! Equally, the GWR got stuck in its ways - it never really understood the importance of high superheat, and the application of four-row superheaters to Castle boilers in the 1950s transformed their performance.

They only did so with wide fireboxes, cast frames and huge outside cylinders which gave their locos poor ride quality, a rolling gait and very uneven draught on the fire which in turn caused half the coal to go up the chimney unburnt. By comparison, the GIPR/NWR 2-10-0, as with the Indian Pacifics, had four average size cylinders, 135-degree crank spacing, giving eight equally spaced exhaust beats per wheel revolution, resulting in a very even draught on the fire, reduced noise and generally very smooth running.

While essentially correct, I feel that this ignores many other contributory factors in the development of the railway network. Most railways were built not to address an established need or because of any great vision, but purely as an opportunistic (and usually unsuccessful) get-rich-quick scheme, often combined with a desire to obstruct a coma,speting scheme from a rival company, or to get one over The Other Guy (witness the knife-fight between Edward Watkin and James Staats-Forbes over Watkins' Metropolitan and JSF's District railways and also EW's South-Eastern and JSF's LCDR, a dog-eat-dog competition so incredibly pointless and monumentally silly that it bankrupted both companies and forced them to merge). Then you had obstructive landowners and commercial vested interests in places like Stamford, Northampton, Kingston-upon-Thames, Windsor/Eton and Marlborough, leaving those towns languishing with poorer rail services on less significant lines built later when they realised their mistake, and some of which have since closed (Marlborough and Calne have had no rail service since Beeching)... There were also issues with penny-pinching construction budgets leading to weak bridges, bridge collapses and tunnel cave-ins (e.g. the SER tunnels on the Tonbridge to Redhill and Hastings lines, which had to be lined down, leaving them with an incredibly tight loading gauge), construction cock-ups like that at Oxted Tunnel, where excavation from both ends meant they failed to meet in the middle and had to connect the two misaligned bores with a tight reverse S-bend which again constricts the loading gauge... In London, it took the ruthless Machiavellian machinations of a literal gangster from Chicago (which he'd had to leave in a hurry when his fraudulent crimes there were exposed) to make sense of the mess caused by Watkins, Staats-Forbes and other colourful personalities like J. Whitaker Wright... Charles Tyson Yerkes may have been a con-man, but it is to him that London owes thanks for its integrated public transport network. He bought up most of the then extant Tube network, integrated them all into Underground Electric Railways of London, and when the tram and bus companies objected to his expansion of the network, he simply bought them all out and integrated their surface services with his trains... without Yerkes and UERL, there would have been no LPTB/LT/TFL. In short: never credit the Victorians with too much common sense. Profit motive and ego usually came first, often at the cost of viability.

One reason why I like 5ft 6in gauge is that it provides so much more room between locomotive frames for a decent size firebox and ashpan, plus larger diameter boilers etc. Worth looking up the 4-cylinder 2-10-0 North British built for India (GIPR/NWR) - it was a monster, and even with only 160psi, had a tractive effort in excess of 50,000lb - 250psi would have raised that to 78,230lb, near enough two 9Fs' worth (albeit it had the smaller driving wheel diameter of the 8F - for any given boiler pressure it was worth 2.17 of those). You can obviously also haul much more freight in a wider wagon with lower rolling resistance. Further benefits for ride quality, stability and passenger carriage space.

Something I really like about the world of model railways is that one need not be tied too closely to factual reality as we know it, but can instead imagine what might have been... One of my interests aside from railways is Alternate History, and particularly "Alien Space Bats" scenarios involving a particular person, location or collection of items being projected back through town. One of the best was written by a then Birmingham City Councillor, Iain Bowen, on Thatcher's Britain finding itself back in the 1730s (rest of the world). He also did a rather good one (much shorter) on an alternative development of British Railways from the 1950s onwards. My interest, however, was sparked by watching many Jago Hazzard videos about the nonsensical petty rivalries and pyramid schemes behind many of Britain's railways, plus the knowledge that many routes were poorly planned and almost all suffer moderately or even severely restricted loading gauges, leads me to ask, suppose you were moved back in time (whether involuntarily or via elective time travel) to the 1820s, or possibly earlier, how would you go about planning, designing and building a network fit not only for its time but for all time? Stuff that would make that alternate timeline's Jago Hazzard marvel at how the founding fathers of Britain's railways really got it absolutely right first time, while at the same time probably meaning he'd have far fewer stories to tell, because let's face it, cock-ups, con artists and willy-waving enmities are far more entertaining than sensible success. Would you opt for pre-emptive nationalisation, with some kind of centralised rail executive having the final say on all route planning and construction as part of a nationwide strategy? What track and loading gauge would you go for? I'm thinking that the main line gauge throughout Britain, Europe and the colonies should be 5ft 6in, with a 16ft x 12ft loading gauge. This brings so many benefits, not least the ability to have corridor/compartment stock that isn't hideously cramped... I'd permit the use of narrow gauge for smaller feeder lines (as well as entire systems such as Man and Wight), but even then, I would propose a single gauge of 2ft 9in (being exactly half the main line gauge), with goods wagons designed with quick-release bodies of which four could be craned onto a suitable broad-gauge wagon chassis for quick and easy transshipment - a form of proto-containerisation, if you will. Such lines would need to have a very specific geographical, topographical and economic justification for not being full size broad gauge main lines - doing it just because it's cheap would not in itself be a justification. Clearly, you couldn't realistically run a broad gauge line up the Ffestiniog, not even if it was single-track, but sillinesses like Southwold would not be permitted. How would the routes chosen in this timeline differ from those we know today, or which were lost to closure? For instance, I would envisage the Great Western Railway being routed via Windsor, Newbury, Marlborough and Calne, with a Bath to Taunton direct line via Wells and Glastonbury. The Southampton to Dorchester route could also be extended to Exeter, potentially obviating all those little north-south branch lines along the East Devon coast. A better solution to the Exeter to Plymouth route would need to be found - I favour a route up the gorge of the River Teign from Dunsford to Chagford then across the wild open moor to Princetown and Plymouth (possibly calling at Yelverton), but then that's just because I love Dartmoor and wish we had a railway to exploit those grand views in the way the Settle & Carlisle does, for example. I would also route the Salisbury and Southampton lines via Winchester, Alton, Farnham, Guildford, Kingston and Roehampton, bypassing Andover and Basingstoke, neither of which is likely to develop the importance they gained in the 20th century. Gloucester would be served via a main line leaving the GWML at Windsor, heading through the Chilterns via Maidenhead, Henley and Wallingford to Oxford then crossing the Cotswolds via Witney, Burford and Northleach - I looked at an alternative routing via Cirencester and Stroud but it's ten miles longer. Oxford to Birmingham via Woodstock, Chipping Norton and Stratford-upon-Avon is a possibility, perhaps as well as rather than instead of the existing route via Banbury. A fast direct London to Norwich route via Bury St Edmunds would also be useful. ECML I'd route from Peterborough via Lincoln and Gainsborough to York, with Stamford-Grantham-Newark-Doncaster-Retford-Selby as a relief route. The main Newcastle to Edinburgh route would be inland via Jedburgh rather than faffing round via Berwick, you'd save twenty miles and hopefully avoid all those sharp curves in the Morpeth/Alnwick area. Not to say the coastal route couldn’t be useful... I'd also be tempted to build a York to Carlisle route via Ripon, Leyburn and Appleby, perhaps more useful than the S&C or Stainmore routes... Regarding locomotive policy, I'd be tempted to avoid the competition between different companies or BR regions and impose a BESA group of standard classes as was done in India, and just contract them out to independent builders like Stephensons, or maybe even have just one or two national locomotive workshops, maybe one in the North producing heavy goods locos and one further south focusing on fast passenger locos, but using the maximum of common parts. The amount of money that got wasted on bad locomotive designs... competition seemed just to result in backward parochialism rather than innovation most of the time. Anyway, your thoughts?