DenysW

RT1499 (aka KGK 758) appears to have been a better bus, and has made it into preservation, with internet pictures in both red and green liveries. Better, but now confused.

And with the Marketing/PR aspects (a very strong influence in LMS), do you want to tell them you're working on 150 mph steam in 1935-ish, only for them to tell the world (without asking you) that it'll be ready by 1937-ish. With the gruesome examples of the PR fanfares over GWR's Great Bear, and the extra couple of years to get the LMS Jubilees right, still in the memory.

While I have to agree with the technical logic behind Northmoor's and What57's comments, it doesn't explain what LNER were doing with 'braking trials', or LMS were doing competing with them and smashing the crockery coming into Crewe. To me there are also questions whether the 1930s coaches and the couplings were up to much more than 100 mph in routine service, and this is also before the smoother modern ride of welded rails. 6202 still feels like an exploration of doing more to beat LNER (and the Germans) than adding go-faster stripes onto the Duchesses. Presumably one change of the gearing between the steam turbine and the wheels would have been enough for the locomotive, but only been the first big step of several big steps.

A question really ... Was Turbomotive (LMS 6202) not actually an attempt to save coal and water compared to a reciprocating engine, but really an under-the-radar step on the way to a 150 mph steam engine? Put into simplistic terms, 7' wheels = 22' per revolution, and 22'/sec is 15 mph. This then means 10 revolutions per second for 150 mph, which mean all the slidey bits all have to go forwards and backwards 10 times a second, the steam valves have to full-open and full-close much faster than 10 times a second so that the steam can pass easily, even the steam has to accelerate and stop in some pipes 10 times a second. Worse as the wheels get smaller. Maybe Stanier thought that this was all more than the reciprocating technology could be asked to achieve, and that 150 mph reliably meant turbines, warts and all. This would also help explain it being dropped after WW2: the targets for the then-foreseable future (say 10 years) did not include 150 mph steam trains. 6202, designed at 2000 hp at 75 mph, then makes sense as a proving ground for the ability to use turbines to go fast with appreciable loads - and possibly explore some energy efficiencies.

One of my History teachers had fought in Italy during WW2, and he reckoned that the Italians were ferocious, brave fighters - for something they believed in. In his case he's seen the ones who wanted to throw the Nazi occupiers out.

I find this one impressively powerful-looking, but also ugly. Without the white-lining I think it would be through to very ugly.

Apart from the FACT that running crimson lake express passenger engines is a requirement to be the top British company, I think each had their own needs, specialities, stupidities, and trying to allocate to top company is futile. Basically done on emotion, which you can't argue folks out of.

There's also the 'what if' GNR/NER/NBR had resisted being grouped in with the financial disaster that was GCR, sending it into the Midland/LNWR/GSWR Grouping and giving them a LMNWG Railway, but receiving Caley, GNoS, and the HR in exchange, to become the GNES Railway.

According to C.E. Stretton's "The History of the Midland Railway" (1901), p 222, in October 1877 the GNR and the MR launched an unsucessful bid to purchase the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (to function as a M&GN Joint Railway) because Watkin wanted 4.5% for the MS&L shareholders, and the maximum joint offer was 4%. Watkin's London Extension then ensured that the GCR stopped paying dividends to Ordinary shareholders by the mid 1890s, having only enough money for Preferred Shareholders, loans, and dentures, and not all of those every year. Surprisingly he eventually left under a cloud. Whart47 said: "An ideological opposition to nationalisation helped too". Agreed. If you nationalise the lot, you can do any re-structure you like. If that's out of the question on political/idealogical grounds, you force yoyrself into compromises that fit the non-nationalisation rulebook.

Sadly this fails the test of how the Government forced private companies to Group into bigger private companies, which was on share prices in, I believe, 1913 - upsetting the Caledonian who had had a bad year that year. To do the sensible thing, whether it's Big (to split the Great Central's London Extension off from it, or to split the various Joint lines ownership into a single Grouped company) or minor (to make sure that the LT&S isn't in LMS) was in the 'too hard' basket. This doesn't mean that I don't like complementary ideas such as unifying the express lines (ECML, WCML, MML, GWML) into a single organisation in 1923, or unifying the freight operations (Westminster focus probably regards these solely as a way to get MPs coal reliably to their second homes in the capital), but no, 'too hard' basket.

In my 1960's school there was French Set 1, French Set 2, then French Set 3. For the small remainder - for whom French was a lost cause- there was: Economics! They mostly failed the "O" level, and, having progressed to the "A" level and failed it, went out into the wide world. I feel I understand why UK financial policy is incomprehensible - they started to run the country having been selected only by an inability to learn French. The relegation of the bottom history set to learning History of Yorkshire may explain the continuance of the God's Own County myth.

Shays (the commonest) have the boiler offset and have vertical cylinders as the counter-weight. The rest are symmetrical, with features like V-arrangement cylinders. I think AlfaZagato has hit the nail on the head: the technology did not exist to change gear while the loco was in motion, with the gearing on the steam turbine locomotives possibly providing a way forward. But having ridden in cars before synchromesh became universal, I doubt the couplings on railway wagons would have survived a rough gear change.

As did LNER, and Southern. Just have a read of the WikiPedia entry on Locomotives of the Southern Railway and you'll believe that the only period when they weren't Top UK Designers for steam traction was when they took their eye off the ball to become Top World Designers of suburban electric traction. For LNER I give you speed records downhill that the locomotive does not survive intact (but the latter isn't mentioned by their fans). LMS I think was still too busy in-fighting the battle LNWR vs MR to care what the others were up to until it decided to join in the 'most powerful passenger locomotive' sweepstakes.

Agreed, but accepting that anything that we produce even can be done better outside our shores goes against the British self-image. Our attempts to defeat Whyte were much milder, and seem mostly limited to Sturrock's 47 booster-fitted GNR locos, followed by the three that Gresley designed.

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This may be a minor difference, but I believe that (a) was correct and (b) it's Belgian, not French. The Brits believe (including me) that you have to work a lot harder to become a Famous Belgian than a Famous Frenchman, and this could be an attempt. It also could be a petulant attempt to defeat Whyte notation, trying to make it a Famous Belgian Locomotive.

Don't forget the space needed for the completed ones. In my case a Walters operating bascule bridge, which I'd totally underestimated the length of the approach and departure ramps.

... Are you going to record your karaoke for YouTube distribution? ... Yes, folks, there are genuinely worse things than lots of pannier tanks.

I think there's some artistic licence here, and the modeller has added interest by adding a third figure. I'd assume the driver and stoker are at the tender end. I've never read that it normally runs backwards extra to its other eccentricities.

The model shown in the quirky poll's Didcot link shows a little more weight on the drivers than I'd got from the 2D sketch: the cylinders and a counterweight. Still pretty hopeless though.

The Hurricane is one of the options in this year's quirky poll for suggestions for new RTR models, as is the Pearson Single. I fear both will founder, irrespective of rmweb support, on the difficulties of special track (or yet another scale that uses 16.5 mm track).

The typical Crampton seems to have had one pair of (huge) driving wheels and 2-3 pairs of non-driving wheels, often of differing sizes (between axles!) to avoid snagging the non-driving axles on the mechanism. This is clearest (in my limited looking) on the photographs of NBR No. 55 after it had been rebuilt away from a Crampton and renumbered 1009. So yes, they still throw away an absurd - to modern eyes - fraction of the traction weight, But if you are designing for an 1830s Brunel or Stephenson billiard table, it's less of a disaster.

In this case I think we're anticipating H.W. Garratt by 70-ish years and having an 2-2!-2 + 2-2!-2 with the weight of the locomotive transferred to the front and back engines, counter-balanced by bunker+water at the front end and bunker+coal at the back end. It is my belief that Gooch would have done an Iron Duke on this (if he'd gone down this route) and tried it as cctransuk has pictured it, and if one of the front axles broke, converted it to a 2-2-2!-2 + 2-2!-2-2 with two independent wheelsets at the ends. Exclamation mark simply a comment on the size of the driving wheels.

Apologies Mike. The memory must be going, despite that double-Crampton being truly memorable.

Picture originally posted by Rockershovel on p 211. Is it just me or does that just need to be (sort-of) Garratt-ised to work? Get rid of one of the small wheelsets at the boiler/motive unit interface, and put a water tank around the big wheel and over the front wheel to weigh the front down for adhesion. Might be too long, still, of course, but now it's an inverse-Crampton, and they were adequate for light loads at speed.